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

Getting the comfort of std::string without the cost of constructing std::string objects


The std::string class is a really useful class because it simplifies dealing with strings so much. A flaw is that if we want to pass around a substring of it, we need to pass a pointer and a length variable, two iterators, or a copy of the substring. We did that in the previous recipe, where we removed the surrounding whitespace from a string by taking a copy of the substring range that does not contain the surrounding whitespace.

If we want to pass a string or a substring to a library that does not even support std::string, we can only provide a raw string pointer, which is a bit disappointing, because it sets us back to the old C days. Just as with the substring problem, a raw pointer does not carry information about the string length with it. This way, one would have to implement a bundle of a pointer and a string length.

In a simplified way, this is exactly what std::string_view is. It is available...