[Boost-users] [range] unique

Subject: [Boost-users] [range] unique
From: Bill Buklis (boostusr_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-02-22 19:31:05

This may simply be my lack of understanding of the range library as I'm 
still just working my way through the algorithms, but is boost::unique 
returning the correct result range?

Given that std::unique returns an iterator to the first non-unique value 
you can do something like:

vec.erase( std::unique(vec.begin(), vec.end(), vec.end() );

However, boost::unique returns the range of the "unique" values. I would 
expect instead that it would return the range of non-unique values so 
that it matched the standard algorithm version, which effectively 
returns the range of non-unique values. Correspondingly trying:

boost::erase( vec, boost::unique(vec) );

eliminates the complete opposite of what the standard version does. I 
can get around this by calling:

vec.erase( boost::unique(vec).end(), vec.end() );

but this seems rather counter-intuitive to me.

Is this correct? Is this by intent? What is the benefit of having it 
this way? The documentation doesn't mention anything at all about the 
return range in the description. Since I'm still just beginning to use 
the range library, I don't know all the tricks and benefits yet, so I ask.

-- 
Bill