On 01/11/12 15:33, Dave Abrahams wrote:
Wow, I found this documentation hard to use!
I wanted to translate various 1-character substrings into new strings, e.g. translate the TAB character ('\t') to its textual escaped representation "\\t", and I went looking for an algorithm to do it.
After 5 minutes of searching, I *think* the algorithm isn't there, but I'm still not sure.
I think replace_all_copy will do it <http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_51_0/doc/html/boost/algorithm/replace_all_copy.html> but it's not specifically targeted at replacing single characters, so may perform worse and/or be more cumbersome to use than something that was. Also, it only replaces one thing at a time. If you wanted to replace many different characters in one pass then you can use <http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_51_0/doc/html/boost/algorithm/find_format_copy.html>, but it will be quite cumbersome. (And, to add to your complaints: I wish the docs for that function linked to the docs for the Finder and Formatter concepts!).
I nearly went blind (well, not really, but it felt that way) looking at http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_51_0/doc/html/string_algo/reference.html#hea... because there's no vertical whitespace. More importantly, there's *no description of what any of these algorithms actually do*!
Did you notice that you can click on the function names to get more detailed info? This isn't wonderful for finding the algorithm you want, but there *is* a description of the algorithms, and the quick reference is there for browsing purposes.
.... calming down ...
Heh, very terse descriptions are in the "Quick Reference": http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_51_0/doc/html/string_algo/quickref.html These might be good enough for me, but I always figure I'm going to get complete detail from the non-quick reference, and this one is just a dump of all the declarations, so I had to go around in a big circle and begin writing this documentation complaint before I found it.
Can this situation be improved?