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 Be sure that knowledge from this book won’t get outdated, as more and more Boost libraries become part of the C++ Standard.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

Parsing simple input


It is a common task to parse a small text. Such situations are always a dilemma: shall we use some third-party professional and good tools for parsing such as Bison or ANTLR, or shall we try to write it by hand using only C++ and standard library? The third-party tools are good for handling the parsing of complex texts, and it is easy to write parsers using them, but they require additional tools for creating C++ or C code from their grammar, and add more dependencies to your project.

Handwritten parsers are usually hard to maintain, but they require nothing except a C++ compiler.

Let's start from a very simple task to parse a date in the ISO format as follows:

YYYY-MM-DD 

The following are the examples of possible input:

2013-03-01 
2012-12-31  // (woo-hoo, it almost a new year!) 

We will need parser's grammar from the following link http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc333:

   date-fullyear   = 4DIGIT 
   date-month      = 2DIGIT  ; 01-12 
   date-mday       = 2DIGIT  ; 01-28, 01-29...