Re: [Boost-users] [range] begin()/end() for zero terminated strings

From: Raider (sraider_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-19 05:35:05

David Abrahams wrote:
> on Wed Jun 18 2008, Raider <sraider-AT-yandex.ru> wrote:
> 
>> Can anyone tell why boost 1.35 dropped support of boost::begin()/end()
>> for zero terminated strings (const char*/wchar_t*)?
> 
> Because it was evil in generic code.  An array of char was interpreted
> as being as long as the initial sequence of nonzero elements, but an
> array of anything else was interpreted as being as long as the array.
> 
> You might ask why we didn't make it so that char(&)[N] was interpreted
> as an array of length N but char* was interpreted as a null-terminated
> string that only has forward iterators (to avoid O(N) "random access"
> operations, which are also evil in generic code)... I'm not entirely
> sure of the answer to that.
> 

I've got the problem. It's not possible to correctly distinguish 
null-terminated strings and straight arrays...

May be the solution is to make something like strbegin()/strend() and 
include it to the Boost.StringAlgo library.

Or... proxy container like this:

template <typename Char>
class NullTerminatedStringRange
{
   NullTerminatedStringRange(Char*);
   Char* begin();
   Char* end();
}