Re: [boost] Interest in super string class?

From: SeskaPeel (seskapeel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-07-05 08:30:36

First of all I'd like to "come out" too and say that this feature in boost
would be a real joy for all of us "non boost super users" (I have quite a
bunch of them all around me).
I use tokenizer by copy / pasting some code, and regex is still too obscure
for me to be yet at this point. I handle lexical_cast masterfully, but I
never took the time to read format documentations because I never thought it
could be useful fro strings. I never heard of string_algo or xpressive
before today.
All in all, having a class that proposes all string related algorithms in a
clean interface, aimed only at strings looks like something I've been
missing for years.

Jeff Garland wrote:
> Compare the universe of all available boost string processing 
> free functions in string_algo, format, lexical_cast, tokenizer, regex, and

> xpressive versus super_string.  super_string is much smaller.  And 
> super_string can be documented without the 'noise' of all the template 
> parameters associated with the lower level libraries.

Speaking strictly of strings, I think this is the main problem.
Maybe beginning by writing a doc that teaches simply what can be done on
strings, using all boost libs would be the better thing to do? Basically,
that's what the super_string documentation will do.
At least, I, would be very pleased to find such a tutorial, and would get a
lot of use to it.
The second step might be to wrap all that features in free functions (I
wonder why there isn't a namespace boost::string_algo that provides all
supports for strings), and maybe the third to have a class that provides a
clean interface. But I'll leave that up to you boosts super users.

Maybe I'm not super user enough to have a good point on this, but at least,
you can be sure I'm not a lazy developer and reading docs is my hobby. I
feel weird realizing that I missed a lot of strings features from boost.

        SeskaPeel.