Hello all,

I’m having trouble with boost format and precision specifiers with strings. The problem is that if I don’t specify the ‘s’ in the format string, a precision specifier does not truncate the string as I would expect:

format(“%.4s”) % some_string

The above will truncate some_string to the first four chars.

            format(“%|.4s|”) % some_string

Same thing. However, the following does not truncate:

            format(“%|.4|”) % some_string

This is confusing because the biggest boon to using boost::format for me is that the type specifier is (I thought) unnecessary. I would think that format would see the .4 and use that as precision if a floating point value was provided and use it as the length of the string if a string was provided.

Is this a bug or is this the intended behavior?

Thanks!

Jason.

If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.

--Alan Perlis