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Best Boost to use for boost::python with Python 3.7/3.8?
by Kacvinsky, Tom 06 Nov '19

06 Nov '19

Subject is the question. Any recommendations? Looking at the boost documentation for boost::python, it doesn't look like the copyright has changed since 2015, but compiling boost 1.6.9.0, for instance, points out there have been code changes.

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[Test] log_level (was RE: [1.72][Test][Math][Fiber] Recent breaking change in Boost.Test breaks fiber/math tests)
by Peter Bartlett 05 Nov '19

05 Nov '19

>I think it is very counter-intuitive that messages only emerge to the normal output if there is an error or --log_level="message" > >And that > > #define BOOST_TEST_LOG_LEVEL "message" > >does not appear to have the same effect as --log_level="message" > >which is also surprising, and in my book a buglet? > >I suggest that this behaviour should be changed so that BOOST_TEST_MESSAGE >*always* produces output. > >BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE(test_message) >{ > BOOST_TEST_MESSAGE("\nTest BOOST_TEST_MESSAGE.\n"); } // BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE(test_message) > >Otherwise I am sure I will not be the only person confused. > >At the very least the documentation should highlight that ones expectation may not match what actually happens. Hi, I think it would be a bad idea to change the default value of --log_level (in your suggestion, from "error" to "message"). The default has been "error" for a long time (I don't like to count how long, because it makes me feel old!). And I'm sure that a lot of parsing tools have been built around the world assuming Boost.Test output is of a certain form. I know I've had to 'teach' various CI systems Boost.Test-speak over the years. > #define BOOST_TEST_LOG_LEVEL "message" BOOST_TEST_LOG_LEVEL is supported as an environment variable, not as a macro. Supporting it as a macro would be a bad idea for similar reasons as above - the layout and volume of the output should be for the *user* to control not the author of the tests, or otherwise the user can't rely on what the test output is going to look like from one library to the next. If you, personally, always want the log_level to be 'message', then you should set the environment variable BOOST_TEST_LOG_LEVEL permanently on your system. Hope that helps, Pete

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[histogram] [1.72] merge usability patch?
by Hans Dembinski 05 Nov '19

05 Nov '19

Dear release managers, I have a patch in my develop branch for Boost.Histogram which would like to merge to the master for the 1.72 release. https://github.com/boostorg/histogram/commit/d658aff0b09f73d4f0d3b729b13518… It is a rather intrusive patch, hence my question whether I am allowed to merge this. There is no change to the public interface. The patch provides nice compile-time error messages when users make mistakes in using the histogram instead of spilling out internals details as it does now, that's why I think it would be good to have this already in the upcoming release instead of the next after. The patch passes all the tests in the CI (and new tests developed for this feature). Line coverage remains at 100 % for Boost.Histogram, therefore I am confident that applying the patch is safe. Best regards, Hans

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Re: [boost] [Boost-users] Interest in a Unicode library for Boost?
by Zach Laine 02 Nov '19

02 Nov '19

On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 3:41 PM Mathias Gaunard <mathias.gaunard(a)ens-lyon.org> wrote: > This email appears to only be addressed to me and not the list, is > that intentional? > I typed this on my phone so maybe things didn't work exactly as I intended. > It was not intentional. > On Fri, 1 Nov 2019 at 16:09, Zach Laine <whatwasthataddress(a)gmail.com> > wrote: > > > Right. Unicode encodes all natural languages that anyone has taken the > time to put into Unicode. I stand by the implication that natural > languages are crazy. > > Natural languages -- and their transliteration to bytes -- are > arbitrary conventions yes, but they're sufficiently consistent to be > used by millions of people in their personal and professional life > everyday. > There are rules, and however alien they might look to someone who only > needs the fairly straightforward ASCII system, they are not crazy, and > have their own reasons. > > > > So then maybe don't use those parts? They're independent; you don't > have to use them to use the Unicode algorithms. > > Separation of concerns, they do appear coupled in the documentation. > That could just be due to the way the documentation is written. > Could be ... could you point to something in the docs that left you with that impression? I explicitly divided up the documentation along the lines of the separation of concerns found in the code -- the string layer, the Unicode layer, and the text layer. I also tried to be explicit that the first is without dependencies, the second does not depend on the first or the third, and that the third depends on the second. > > Clearly you are more capable than I am. It took me a lot longer to do > than 2 months. Why did you never submit this for a Boost review? You were > thinking about it, ~10 years ago, but you never did.... > > The use case for Unicode is quite niche, and I wasn't particularly > interested in working in that niche further. > Any serious natural language processing engine would probably bypass > Unicode and come up with its own heuristics to parse text, and > applications like GUI toolkits or text editors are specialized enough > that they'd probably never use a library which wasn't specifically > designed for their use case in mind. > That leaves everyday programming, which very rarely needs to do > anything with text beyond treating it as a byte stream, and I believe > wanting to impose the heavyweight Unicode machinery systematically > everywhere is a mistake. > > Anyway, I was just mentioning this because there is prior work > (Boost.Unicode) that you apparently never looked at. > Of course being developed for only a short period of time it doesn't > have the same level of polish as your library. > Ok. FWIW, I did know about your library -- I was there for the BoostCon presentation -- and I was looking forward to using it. Ten years later, I did not look at it again, simply because it had been ten years. > >> and that the database itself is not even accessible, > > > > > > That's also intentional. Another goal of the library is to make Unicode > as simple as possible for naive users who just want to do the basics. If I > find requests for any new feature that has a compelling use case, I'll add > that. > > Being able to replace things like std::isalpha etc. is pretty basic I'd > say. > Having an API that tells you a number of properties about a code point > is one of the most useful parts of Unicode. > I agree I the abstract, but I think that there is a real problem that the properties for a given code point are not necessarily consistent across the various Unicode algorithms. For example, there are multiple notions of "number" that are treated differently in the bidirectional algorithm. Moreover, I don't know of a great use case for a boost::text::is_alpha(). Specifically, it seams that if you are looking for alphabetical characters, you are usually doing something like word-breaking, for which there is already an algorithm, doing a regex match, for which is_alpha() is insufficient, etc. I'm open to hearing about such use cases, of course. > > I don't consider 1.5MB for a database containing all human languages in > widespread use on computers to be a ridiculous size, but YMMV. > > I suppose that's reasonable. > I think the Boost.Unicode one was only 500k but that's an old Unicode > version, and I'm not sure it ever had full collation support. > > > > >> > >> It also doesn't provide the ability to do fast substring search, which > >> you'd typically do by searching for a substring at the character > >> encoding level and then eliminating matches that do not fall on a > >> satisfying boundary, instead suggesting to do the search at the > >> grapheme level which is much slower, and the facility to test for > >> boundary isn't provided anyway. > > > > > > I honestly don't know what you mean here. > > I'm not sure how to clarify this better, but I'll try. > > To search for the utf-8 substring "foo" in the utf-8 string "I really > like foo dogs", there is no need to iterate the string per code point > or per grapheme as you do in your examples. You can just perform the > search at the code unit level, then check that the position before and > after the match does not lie inside a grapheme cluster, i.e. they are > on a valid boundary. > What you need to be able to do that is a function that tells you > whether an arbitrary position in your sequence of utf-8 code units > lies at a grapheme cluster boundary or not (which would probably be a > composition of two separate functions, one that test whether the code > unit is on a code point boundary, and one that tests whether the code > point is on a grapheme cluster boundary). This functionality is not > provided. > > This sort of thing is briefly touched upon in Unicode TR#29 6.4. > I see. This seems like it might be really useful to add. I'll open a ticket for it on Github. Zach

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Interest in a Unicode library for Boost?
by Zach Laine 02 Nov '19

02 Nov '19

About 14 months ago I posted the same thing. There was significant work that needed to be done to Boost.Text (the proposed library), and I was a bit burned out. Now I've managed to make the necessary changes, and I feel the library is ready for review, if there is interest. This library, in part, is something I want to standardize. It started as a better string library for namespace "std2", with minimal Unicode support. Though "std2" will almost certainly never happen now, those string types are still in there, and the library has grown to also include all the Unicode features most users will ever need. Github: https://github.com/tzlaine/text Online docs: https://tzlaine.github.io/text If you care about portable Unicode support, or even addressing the embarrassment of being the only major production language with next to no Unicode support, please have a look and provide feedback. I gave a talk about this at C++Now in May 2018, and now it's a bit out of date, as the library was not then finished. It's three hours, so, y'know, maybe skip it. For completeness' sake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=944GjKxwMBo&index=7&list=PL_AKIMJc4roVSbTTf… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ2xMAqCZL8&list=PL_AKIMJc4roVSbTTfHReQTl1d… Zach

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[filesystem] Management of junction on Windows is broken
by Vincent R. 02 Nov '19

02 Nov '19

Hello, I am bit disappointed to see that symlink and junctions are still not really properly handled on Windows with boost (and even with standard MS libs but that's another story.) First my environment: Windows 10, VS2019 16.3.7, boost 1.71 (static, x64). I would like to write a small c++ utility that does not use os dependent code to handle files so filesystem seems a good candidate. Here is what I am doing on Windows: cd "C:\Users\Vincent\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync" mklink /j Backup E:\Backup So basically I am creating inside C:\..\MobileSync a junction folder that points to my second harddisk E:\Backup Then I am checking that Windows recognize it by entering dir command: 01/11/2019 23:48 <DIR> . 01/11/2019 23:48 <DIR> .. 01/11/2019 23:29 <JUNCTION> Backup [E:\Backup] 0 fichier(s) 0 octets 3 Rép(s) 59 393 630 208 octets libres As you can see I have a junction targeting E:\Backup, so now let's see what happens with boost: fs::path p(_T("C:\\Users\\Vincent\\AppData\\Roaming\\Apple Computer\\MobileSync\\Backup")); sys::error_code ec; if (fs::is_symlink(p)) { fs::path pathTarget = fs::read_symlink(p, ec); } When I display the content of pathTarget I have: L"\\Backup" ie Backup if I decode it into human string I might not understand anything about junction but is it not supposed to return E:\Backup ?? When I look at source code I can see the following lines: /********************** boost_1_71_0\libs\filesystem\src\operations.cpp **************************************/ symlink_path.assign( static_cast<wchar_t*>(info.rdb.SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer.PathBuffer) + info.rdb.SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer.PrintNameOffset/sizeof(wchar_t), static_cast<wchar_t*>(info.rdb.SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer.PathBuffer) + info.rdb.SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer.PrintNameOffset/sizeof(wchar_t) + info.rdb.SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer.PrintNameLength/sizeof(wchar_t)); This is wrong since we need to distinguish between a symlink and a junction folder so here is my contribution : --- a/src/operations.cpp +++ b/src/operations.cpp @@ -201,6 +201,12 @@ typedef struct _REPARSE_DATA_BUFFER { # ifndef IO_REPARSE_TAG_SYMLINK # define IO_REPARSE_TAG_SYMLINK (0xA000000CL) # endif +# ifndef IO_REPARSE_TAG_MOUNT_POINT +# define IO_REPARSE_TAG_MOUNT_POINT (0xA0000003L) +# endif +# ifndef IO_REPARSE_TAG_DEDUP +# define IO_REPARSE_TAG_DEDUP (0x80000013L) +# endif inline std::wstring wgetenv(const wchar_t* name) { @@ -1661,12 +1667,24 @@ namespace detail if (!error(::DeviceIoControl(h.handle, FSCTL_GET_REPARSE_POINT, 0, 0, info.buf, sizeof(info), &sz, 0) == 0 ? BOOST_ERRNO : 0, p, ec, "boost::filesystem::read_symlink" )) + if (info.rdb.ReparseTag == IO_REPARSE_TAG_SYMLINK) + { symlink_path.assign( static_cast<wchar_t*>(info.rdb.SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer.PathBuffer) + info.rdb.SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer.PrintNameOffset/sizeof(wchar_t), static_cast<wchar_t*>(info.rdb.SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer.PathBuffer) + info.rdb.SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer.PrintNameOffset/sizeof(wchar_t) + info.rdb.SymbolicLinkReparseBuffer.PrintNameLength/sizeof(wchar_t)); + } + else if (info.rdb.ReparseTag == IO_REPARSE_TAG_MOUNT_POINT) + { + symlink_path.assign( + static_cast<wchar_t*>(info.rdb.MountPointReparseBuffer.PathBuffer) + + info.rdb.MountPointReparseBuffer.PrintNameOffset / sizeof(wchar_t), + static_cast<wchar_t*>(info.rdb.MountPointReparseBuffer.PathBuffer) + + info.rdb.MountPointReparseBuffer.PrintNameOffset / sizeof(wchar_t) + + info.rdb.MountPointReparseBuffer.PrintNameLength / sizeof(wchar_t)); + } # endif return symlink_path; } I will add more suggestions in a next message because there is no consistency between boost and MSVC approach. I don't know the last c++ specifications but it shouldn't be difficult to have a simple approach;

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Re: [boost] [Boost-users] Interest in a Unicode library for Boost?
by Zach Laine 01 Nov '19

01 Nov '19

Mathias pointed out that I sent this just to him. So I'm replying again to get this onto the list. Sorry for the noise. On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 11:09 AM Zach Laine <whatwasthataddress(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 6:35 AM Mathias Gaunard < > mathias.gaunard(a)ens-lyon.org> wrote: > >> On Sat, 26 Oct 2019 at 02:11, Zach Laine via Boost-users >> <boost-users(a)lists.boost.org> wrote: >> > >> > About 14 months ago I posted the same thing. There was significant >> work that needed to be done to Boost.Text (the proposed library), and I was >> a bit burned out. >> > >> > Now I've managed to make the necessary changes, and I feel the library >> is ready for review, if there is interest. >> > >> > This library, in part, is something I want to standardize. >> > >> > It started as a better string library for namespace "std2", with >> minimal Unicode support. Though "std2" will almost certainly never happen >> now, those string types are still in there, and the library has grown to >> also include all the Unicode features most users will ever need. >> > >> > Github: https://github.com/tzlaine/text >> > Online docs: https://tzlaine.github.io/text >> >> I would start by removing the superlative statements about Unicode >> being "hard" or "crazy". >> It's not that complicated compared to the actual hard problems that >> software engineers solve everyday. The only thing is that people >> misunderstand what the scope of Unicode is, it's not just an encoding, >> it's a a database and a set of algorithms (relying on said database) >> to facilitate natural text processing of arbitrary scripts, and does >> compromises to integrate with existing industry practices prior to all >> those scripts being brought together under the same umbrella. >> > > Right. Unicode encodes all natural languages that anyone has taken the > time to put into Unicode. I stand by the implication that natural > languages are crazy. > > >> Now the string/container/memory management, this is quite irrelevant. >> That sort of stuff has nothing to do with Unicode and I certainly do >> not want some Unicode library to mess with the way I am organizing how >> my data is stored in memory. >> Your rope etc. containers belong in a completely independent library. >> > > So then maybe don't use those parts? They're independent; you don't have > to use them to use the Unicode algorithms. > > >> What's important is providing an efficient Unicode character database, >> and implementing the algorithms in a way that is generic, working for >> arbitrary ranges and being able to be lazily evaluated (i.e. range >> adaptors). >> I already did all that work more than 10 years ago as a two-month GSoC >> project, though there are some limitations since at that time ranges >> and ranges adaptors were still fairly new ideas for C++. It does >> however provide a generic framework to define arbitrary algorithms >> that can be evaluated either lazily or eagerly. >> > > Clearly you are more capable than I am. It took me a lot longer to do > than 2 months. Why did you never submit this for a Boost review? You were > thinking about it, ~10 years ago, but you never did.... > > >> To be honest I can't say I find your library to be much of an >> improvement, at least in terms of usability, since the programming >> interface seems more constrained (why don't things work with arbitrary >> ranges rather than this "text" containers) > > > They do, of course. I'm not sure why it is you think otherwise. > > >> and verbose (just look at >> the code to do transcoding with iterators), > > > Are you referring to the verbosity of: > > char const * some_utf8 = /* ... */ ; > out = std::ranges::copy(boost::text::as_utf32(some_utf8), out); > > , or: > > out = boost::text::transcode_utf_8_to_32(utf8_first, utf8_last, out); > > , or something else? > > >> the set of features is >> quite small, > > > That is quite intentional. I want to standardize *basic* Unicode > support. I feel that what I have in Boost.Text is the basic set that users > will need, just to support languages or formatting conventions that are not > common in their favorite environment. For instance, today there is no > standard way of taking UTF-8 and turning it into UTF-16, or vice versa; > this library is intended to work at that level. That is, it is intended to > fill in needless gaps in Unicode support that exist in C++ -- gaps that no > other major language besides C has. It is specifically not intended to > replace all ICU functionality. Do you have specific things in mind that > you think ~90% of Unicode-aware C++ users will need? Note that I did not > say 100%. > > >> and that the database itself is not even accessible, > > > That's also intentional. Another goal of the library is to make Unicode > as simple as possible for naive users who just want to do the basics. If I > find requests for any new feature that has a compelling use case, I'll add > that. > > >> and >> last I remember your implementation was ridiculously bloated in size. >> > > I don't consider 1.5MB for a database containing all human languages in > widespread use on computers to be a ridiculous size, but YMMV. > > >> It also doesn't provide the ability to do fast substring search, which >> you'd typically do by searching for a substring at the character >> encoding level and then eliminating matches that do not fall on a >> satisfying boundary, instead suggesting to do the search at the >> grapheme level which is much slower, and the facility to test for >> boundary isn't provided anyway. >> > > I honestly don't know what you mean here. If you use the text::text or > text::string types, those are just contiguous sequences of bits, like a > std::vector or std::string. text::text exposes iterators to those bits > which can be used to get grapheme, code point, and/or UTF-8 byte views of > the underlying data. If you are using something else besides text::text or > text::string two types, you presumably have access to your own bits in your > own representation. What prevents you from doing whatever substring search > you like, via std::search(), std::ranges::includes(), or something else? > Boost.Text is not intended as a string algorithms library. > > I'm pretty sure I made similar comments in the past, but I don't feel >> like any of them has been addressed. >> > > I think you're referring to this email you sent in the Boost.Text > interest thread from 14 months ago: > > """ > The Unicode library I did as a SoC project in 2009 was significantly > smaller than that and if I recall correctly it has more data than the one > in your library. > Clearly some work can be done here to better optimize the database size. > """ > > I did make it a bit smaller. The other comments are new. > > Zach > >

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Change TCP_USER_TIMEOUT
by JH 01 Nov '19

01 Nov '19

Hi, I am using boost asio TCP socket in my device application for network connection in Linux platform. I am troubled currently by long TCP tmeout issues in a device to switch application between WiFi and 4G LTE. If my application TCP was connected via 4G LTE initially, when WiFi is available, the network is switched to WiFi, but the application TCP connection would have 30 minutes timeout before it terminated the 4G LTE and reconnects to WiFi. That 30 minutes is too long. I checked TCP document for TCP_USER_TIMEOUT: TCP_USER_TIMEOUT Decreasing user timeouts allows applications to "fail fast", if so desired. Otherwise, failure may take up to 20 minutes with the current system defaults in a normal WAN environment. My question is, in boost asio socket, is there an API to change TCP_USER_TIMEOUT? Appreciate if showing an example or point me to a document how to do it. Thank you. Kind regards, - jh

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Re: [boost] [Boost-users] Interest in a Unicode library for Boost?
by Zach Laine 30 Oct '19

30 Oct '19

On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 4:51 AM Leon Mlakar <leon(a)digiverse.si> wrote: > On 29.10.2019 17:11, Zach Laine wrote: > > > > >> - for the sake of completeness the normalization type used at the text >> level ought to be a policy parameter; although I do understand your >> arguments against it I think it should be there even at the cost of >> different text types being inoperable without conversions >> > > I disagree. Policy parameters are bad for reasoning. If I see a > text::text, as things currently stand, I know that it is stored as a > contiguous array of UTF-8, and that it is normalized FCC. If I add a > template parameter to control the normalization, I change the invariants of > the type. Types with different invariants should have different names. To > do otherwise is a violation of the single responsibility principle. > > Okay, the policy or not the policy was not my point ... it was to allow > for different underlying normalizations. Granted, it may only be important > to (a few) corner cases where input and/or output normalizations are given, > and your assessment that it may not be worth the effort is reasonable ... > unless you are aiming towards adding to the standard. Then the completeness > imho becomes more important. > > Frankly, I'm not proficient enough in the meta-programming to make a > strong case either for policy parameter or for explicit types/templates. I > just happen to prefer the policy based approach. > Understood. FWIW, the algorithms provided by Boost.Text make it possible to use any normalization representation, though at times conversions may be necessary. Some of those conversions are mandated by the Unicode standard itself -- you cannot feed NFC, NFKC, or NFKC to the collation algorithm, for instance (though implementations are possible for NFD and FCC). > > > - at the text level I'm not sure I'm willing to cope with different >> fundamental text types; I just want to use boost::text::text, pretty >> much the same as I use std::string as an alias to much more complex >> class template; heck, even at the string layer I'd probably prefer >> rope/contiguous concept to be a policy parameter to the same type >> template. >> > > That would be like adding a template parameter to std::vector that makes > it act like a std::deque for certain values of that parameter. Changing > the space and time complexity of a type by changing a template parameter is > the wrong answer. > > No, that is not making the std::vector to act as std::deque - the text > would still remain the text and act as a text, with the same interface. > It's more like FIFO implementation using either std::vector or std::dequeu > for its store - since in both cases the FIFO has the same interface and > functionally behaves the same, I really don't want two distinct types. The > type template with the parameter that makes the choice between the > underlying storage seems much more natural to me. > You example highlights my point. For N inputs to your FIFO queue, a deque underlying implementation is worst-case O(N). A vector implementation is worst-case O(N*N). The invariants of the type matter, and they matter a lot. Saying a foo may be like a bar or like a baz only work when bar and baz are so similar that you cannot observe a difference in the behavior of foo. Zach

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[SPAM] istream_iterator_limited
by Frederick Gotham 28 Oct '19

28 Oct '19

- - - - WHY I NEEDED THIS: I wanted to open a file using "ifstream", and then I wanted to read 32 bytes from the file and feed them directly into boost::algorithm::hex. Unfortunately I couldn't do this because 'hex' takes two iterators [begin,end), and there's no alternative function "hex_n". So I had to read the file into a string first, and then pass the string to 'hex'. - - - - THE IDEA I CAME UP WITH: Open the file using "ifstream", and then use a special iterator that will stop reading from the file after 32 bytes, with syntax like this: ifstream logfile("log.txt"); hex( istream_iterator_limited<char>(logfile,32), istream_iterator_limited<char>(), g_some_global_container.begin() ); - - - - SAMPLE CODE: #include <cstddef> /* size_t */ #include <iterator> /* istream_iterator */ template <typename T> class istream_iterator_limited : public std::istream_iterator<T> { protected: std::size_t const m_limit; std::size_t m_current_count; public: /* Shorter names */ typedef std::istream_iterator<T> Base; typedef istream_iterator_limited<T> This; istream_iterator_limited(typename Base::istream_type &obj_stream, size_t const arg_limit) : Base(obj_stream), m_limit(arg_limit), m_current_count (1) { /* The initialiser list above does all the construction work */ } istream_iterator_limited(void) /* This gives the End-Of-Stream iterator */ : Base() , m_limit(0), m_current_count(1) { /* The initialiser list above does all the construction work */ } This &operator++(void) { if ( m_limit <= m_current_count ) { Base::operator=( Base() ); /* Becomes End-Of- Stream iterator */ } else { ++m_current_count; Base::operator++(); } return *this; } }; #include <algorithm> /* copy */ #include <string> /* string */ #include <sstream> /* istringstream */ #include <iostream> /* cout, endl */ #include <iterator> /* back_inserter */ auto main(void) -> int { std::istringstream iss("123456789"); std::string str; /* Let's use copy to read 5 char's into our string */ std::copy( istream_iterator_limited<char>(iss,5), istream_iterator_limited<char>(), std::back_inserter(str) ); std::cout << str << std::endl; str.clear(); /* Get another 3 */ std::copy( istream_iterator_limited<char>(iss,3), istream_iterator_limited<char>(), std::back_inserter(str) ); std::cout << str << std::endl; }

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