Book Image

C++20 STL Cookbook

By : Bill Weinman
Book Image

C++20 STL Cookbook

By: Bill Weinman

Overview of this book

Fast, efficient, and flexible, the C++ programming language has come a long way and is used in every area of the industry to solve many problems. The latest version C++20 will see programmers change the way they code as it brings a whole array of features enabling the quick deployment of applications. This book will get you up and running with using the STL in the best way possible. Beginning with new language features in C++20, this book will help you understand the language's mechanics and library features and offer insights into how they work. Unlike other books, the C++20 STL Cookbook takes an implementation-specific, problem-solution approach that will help you overcome hurdles quickly. You'll learn core STL concepts, such as containers, algorithms, utility classes, lambda expressions, iterators, and more, while working on real-world recipes. This book is a reference guide for using the C++ STL with its latest capabilities and exploring the cutting-edge features in functional programming and lambda expressions. By the end of the book C++20 book, you'll be able to leverage the latest C++ features and save time and effort while solving tasks elegantly using the STL.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Specialize std::formatter for the path class

The path class is used throughout the filesystem library to represent a file or directory path. On POSIX-conformant systems, such as macOS and Linux, the path object uses the char type to represent filenames. On Windows, path uses wchar_t. On Windows, cout and format() will not display primitive strings of wchar_t characters. This means there is no simple out-of-the-box way to write code that uses the filesystem library and is portable across POSIX and Windows.

We could use preprocessor directives to write specific versions of code for Windows. That may be a reasonable solution for some code bases, but for this book, it's messy and does not serve the purpose of simple, portable, reusable recipes.

The elegant solution is to write a C++20 formatter specialization for the path class. This allows us to display path objects simply and portably.

How to do it…

In this recipe, we write a formatter specialization for use with...