Book Image

Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Anton Polukhin Alekseevic
Book Image

Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Anton Polukhin Alekseevic

Overview of this book

If you want to take advantage of the real power of Boost and C++ and avoid the confusion about which library to use in which situation, then this book is for you. Beginning with the basics of Boost C++, you will move on to learn how the Boost libraries simplify application development. You will learn to convert data such as string to numbers, numbers to string, numbers to numbers and more. Managing resources will become a piece of cake. You’ll see what kind of work can be done at compile time and what Boost containers can do. You will learn everything for the development of high quality fast and portable applications. Write a program once and then you can use it on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android operating systems. From manipulating images to graphs, directories, timers, files, networking – everyone will find an interesting topic. Be sure that knowledge from this book won’t get outdated, as more and more Boost libraries become part of the C++ Standard.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Detecting the Boost version and getting latest features


Boost is being actively developed, so each release contains new features and libraries. Some people wish to have libraries that compile for different versions of Boost and also want to use some of the features of the new versions.

Let's take a look at the boost::lexical_cast change log. According to it, Boost 1.53 has a lexical_cast(const CharType* chars, std::size_t count) function overload. Our task for this recipe will be to use that function overload for new versions of Boost and work around that missing function overload for older versions.

Getting ready

Only basic knowledge of C++ and the Boost.LexicalCast library is required.

How to do it...

Well, all we need to do is get info about the version of Boost and use it to write optimal code. This can be done as shown in the following steps:

  1. We need to include the headers containing the Boost version and boost::lexical_cast:
#include <boost/version.hpp>
#include <boost/lexical_cast...