Two utility operators for converting UTF-8 strings to array and back.

Motivation:

Currently nodes like get_from_string, set_in_string, or slice_string operate on the byte sequences like C++ strings. Effectively lacking support for multibyte encoded characters. By converting a string to its code points first, we can get/set the n-th character in a string, regardless of the byte position and byte length.

Installation

If you are on Windows and use Bifrost 2.12.0.0, you are in luck! Download the prebuild pack from here and point your BIFROST_LIB_CONFIG_FILES to the String2PackConfig.json (tested on Maya 2024 and Maya 2025). Else, follow the instructions for building from the Autodesk website

Operators:

string_to_code_points

string [in, type:string] The string to convert. During conversion, invalid characters (byte sequences) are recorded as 0. As far as I know, strings cannot contain \0 or 0x00 so this should be ok. Surrogate halves and overlong characters are also treated as invalid.

code_points [out, type:array<uint>] An array of uints containing the decimal code point value for valid byte sequences (even if they are empty in UTF-8) and 0 for invalid byte sequences.

code_points_to_string

code_points [in, type:uint|array<uint>] Either a single uint or an array of uints to convert to a string. 0s are ignored, as are any values above U+10FFFF.

string [out, type:string] The resulting string.

Compounds:

validate_string

string [in, type:string] This compound uses string_to_code_points to convert all characters into their code points and then search for 0. If there is no 0 in the code_points, this string is valid.

valid [out, type:bool] Whether this string is valid or not