Question Slicing NativeText

I'm playing around with the Job system to see if I can generate msbuild projects. One of the things I get as input is the list of source files that make up an assembly, which I get as file system paths.

Initially I tried to pass them into the job as NativeArray<NativeText>, but that gave me this output:
InvalidOperationException: Unity.Collections.NativeText used in NativeArray<Unity.Collections.NativeText> must be unmanaged (contain no managed types) and cannot itself be a native container type.

So I'm trying to use a single NativeText member in my job struct and delimit the paths with a special character instead.
Now inside the job's Execute() method I need access paths one by one again to do some string formatting, which brings me to my question:

Is there a safe way of slicing NativeText, i.e. getting a sub-range of the entire thing (like GetSubArray for NativeArray)? The only solution I could come up with involves using GetUnsafePtr() and copying to a temporary, then doing the string formatting via NativeText.AppendFormat.
I tried to get a Span<byte> from the raw data, but that doesn't help me because I can't pass a span to AppendFormat later.

The collections package version I'm currently using is 1.4.0.

 

To answer my own question: Collections 2.x got substring methods (but doesn't help me because it's incompatible with 2021 LTS).

Instead I'm using GetUnsafePtr() and a temporary variable (which is not safe, but works for now).