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

From: Raider (sraider_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-19 10:50:35

>>> 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.
> 
> Actually, the support was not dropped altogether. It was just made explicit
> instead of implicit. You need to use as_literal/as_array helpers if you 
> want
> to dealy with char*/char[]/wchar_t*/wchar_t[] as ranges.

Pavol, great thanks for info!