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

Compressing and decompressing strings


This section deals with a relatively popular task in coding interviews. The basic idea is a function, which takes a string like "aaaaabbbbbbbccc" and transforms it to a shorter string "a5b7c3". It is "a5" because there are five 'a' characters. And then it is "b7" because there are seven 'b' characters. This is a very simple compression algorithm. For normal text, it is of reduced utility because normal language is usually not so repetitive that its text representation would become shorter with this compression scheme. However, it is relatively easy to implement even if we have to do it on a whiteboard without a computer. The tricky part is that it is easy to write a buggy code if the program is not structured very well from the beginning. Dealing with strings is generally not a hard thing, but the chances of implementing buffer overflow bugs lurk around a lot here if legacy C-style formatting functions are used.

Let's try an STL approach to implementing...