A non-allocating library would be forced to return to you the unparsed string literal, since returning a parsed string can require an allocation. It might tell

A non-allocating library would be forced to return to you the unparsed string literal, since returning a parsed string can require an allocation. It might tell you that the literal is valid. E.g., take the JSON: "\"\uD83D\uDCA9\"" There's no (pointer, length) into that that you can then printf(…, ptr, len); you'd get the escapes, raw. Ofc., there might be situations like debugging where that's fine.