Stores and manipulates plain text.

Plain text cannot be displayed, so this class provides no support for formatting. It is purely an in-memory buffer for text, and provides services that act upon it. These services include the following: import from and export to streams, optionally translating between Unicode and other encodings; reading and writing of field data; extraction of text; finding word and paragraph boundaries.

The type and size of in-memory buffer can be specified upon object construction. However, if no specification is provided a buffer is provided with default settings. There are two types of storage buffer: segmented buffers and flat buffers. The default buffer for plain text is segmented (CBufSeg). This is most efficient when a large quantity of text is to be stored, or will have a large dynamic range. A flat buffer (CBufFlat) is most appropriate for storing small quantities of text of bounded length. For most uses, however, a segmented buffer is sufficient.