[boost] [string_algo] Documentation Complaint

Subject: [boost] [string_algo] Documentation Complaint
From: Dave Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-11-01 15:33:49

Wow, I found this documentation hard to use!

I wanted to translate various 1-character substrings into new strings,
e.g. translate the TAB character ('\t') to its textual escaped
representation "\\t", and I went looking for an algorithm to do it.

After 5 minutes of searching, I *think* the algorithm isn't there, but
I'm still not sure.

I nearly went blind (well, not really, but it felt that way) looking at
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_51_0/doc/html/string_algo/reference.html#header.boost.algorithm.string.replace_hpp
because there's no vertical whitespace. More importantly, there's *no
description of what any of these algorithms actually do*!

... calming down ... 

Heh, very terse descriptions are in the "Quick Reference":
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_51_0/doc/html/string_algo/quickref.html
These might be good enough for me, but I always figure I'm going to get
complete detail from the non-quick reference, and this one is just a
dump of all the declarations, so I had to go around in a big circle and
begin writing this documentation complaint before I found it.

Can this situation be improved?

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing                  Software Development        Training
http://www.boostpro.com             Clang/LLVM/EDG Compilers  C++  Boost