...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
world.
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
Copyright © 2000-2005 Kevlin Henney
Copyright © 2006-2010 Alexander Nasonov
Copyright © 2011, 2012 Antony Polukhin
Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
Table of Contents
Sometimes a value must be converted to a literal text form, such as an int
represented as a std::string
,
or vice-versa, when a std::string
is interpreted as an int
. Such examples are common when converting
between data types internal to a program and representation external to a program,
such as windows and configuration files.
The standard C and C++ libraries offer a number of facilities for performing such conversions. However, they vary with their ease of use, extensibility, and safety.
For instance, there are a number of limitations with the family of standard
C functions typified by atoi
:
sprintf
function, or the loss of portability associated with non-standard functions
such as itoa
.
int
, long
, and double
.
The standard C functions typified by strtol
have the same basic limitations, but offer finer control over the conversion
process. However, for the common case such control is often either not required
or not used. The scanf
family
of functions offer even greater control, but also lack safety and ease of use.
The standard C++ library offers stringstream
for the kind of in-core formatting being discussed. It offers a great deal
of control over the formatting and conversion of I/O to and from arbitrary
types through text. However, for simple conversions direct use of stringstream
can be either clumsy (with the
introduction of extra local variables and the loss of infix-expression convenience)
or obscure (where stringstream
objects are created as temporary objects in an expression). Facets provide
a comprehensive concept and facility for controlling textual representation,
but their perceived complexity and high entry level requires an extreme degree
of involvement for simple conversions, and excludes all but a few programmers.
The lexical_cast
function template
offers a convenient and consistent form for supporting common conversions to
and from arbitrary types when they are represented as text. The simplification
it offers is in expression-level convenience for such conversions. For more
involved conversions, such as where precision or formatting need tighter control
than is offered by the default behavior of lexical_cast
,
the conventional std::stringstream
approach is recommended. Where
the conversions are numeric to numeric, boost::numeric_cast
may offer more reasonable behavior than lexical_cast
.
For a good discussion of the options and issues involved in string-based formatting,
including comparison of stringstream
,
lexical_cast
, and others, see
Herb Sutter's article, The
String Formatters of Manor Farm. Also, take a look at the Performance
section.
Last revised: June 23, 2012 at 08:49:15 GMT |