[QScintilla] Using python strings with SendScintilla

[Baz Walter]

Phil Thompson wrote:
> There's no problem with adding something like...
> 
> const char *QsciScintilla::rawText() const;
> void QsciScintilla::setRawText(const char *text);

that sounds good, but i'd like to avoid retrieving the whole text for 
large documents if i only need a (variable length) slice. so for 
rawText(), something equivalent to SCI_GETTEXTRANGE would be nice, with 
startpos and endpos arguments that default to 0, -1 (i.e. textlength - 
1). probably a method like this shouldn't use the row, column style as 
it is dealing with raw text.

for something equivalent to setRawText, i use SCI_REPLACETARGET and 
friends because it doesn't require setting the selection and it doesn't 
cause the scrolling, display updates etc that you get with something 
like SCI_REPLACESEL. this is really essential when implementing methods 
that loop over the document making replacements, as the performance can 
be really horrible otherwise (depends on the size of the document, of 
course).

thanks for taking the time to consider this