Book Image

C++17 STL Cookbook

By : Jacek Galowicz
Book Image

C++17 STL Cookbook

By: Jacek Galowicz

Overview of this book

C++ has come a long way and is in use in every area of the industry. Fast, efficient, and flexible, it is used to solve many problems. The upcoming version of C++ will see programmers change the way they code. If you want to grasp the practical usefulness of the C++17 STL in order to write smarter, fully portable code, then this book is for you. Beginning with new language features, this book will help you understand the language’s mechanics and library features, and offers insight into how they work. Unlike other books, ours takes an implementation-specific, problem-solution approach that will help you quickly overcome hurdles. You will learn the core STL concepts, such as containers, algorithms, utility classes, lambda expressions, iterators, and more, while working on practical real-world recipes. These recipes will help you get the most from the STL and show you how to program in a better way. By the end of the book, you will be up to date with the latest C++17 features and save time and effort while solving tasks elegantly using the STL.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Creating custom string classes by inheriting from std::char_traits


The std::string is extremely useful. However, as soon as people need a string class with slightly different semantics for string handling, some tend to write their own string class.

Writing your own string class is rarely a good idea because safe string handling is hard. Fortunately, std::string is only a specializing typedef of the template class, std::basic_string. This class contains all the complicated memory handling stuff, but it does not impose any policy on how strings are copied, compared, and so on. This is something that is imported into basic_string by accepting a template parameter that contains a traits class.

In this recipe, we will see how to build our own trait classes and, this way, how to create custom strings without reimplementing anything.

How to do it...

We are going to implement two different custom string classes: lc_string and ci_string. The first class constructs lower case strings from any string input...