On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 09:46:44AM -0400, Rob Stewart <stewart@sig.com> wrote:
From: Reece Dunn <msclrhd@hotmail.com>
John Torjo wrote:
Rob Stewart wrote:
Agreed, but pipes ("|") are easier to grok:
"<elem> | </elem><elem> | </elem>"
That's fine too.
This again runs into the problem of what if you want '|' in your format string? One possibility is to use non-printable characters, e.g. \xFF, but I don't think this would have widespread support.
Implementing escaping for the above will complicate the evaluation of the format string as you cannot use str.find( "|" ). One possibility is to check if '\' exists before '|' after a find; if yes, repeat. Thus '\' becomes context-sensitive. This approach leads to "< |\\| >" for "< a\\b\\c >" formatting being ill-defined.
Some other good choices are "#", "@", "!", "^", and "_". Have a look at the previous example (I've removed the spaces so the delimiters are set apart with spaces so we can see how good they really are):
"<elem>|</elem><elem>|</elem>"
"<elem>#</elem><elem>#</elem>"
"<elem>@</elem><elem>@</elem>"
"<elem>!</elem><elem>!</elem>"
"<elem>^</elem><elem>^</elem>"
"<elem>_</elem><elem>_</elem>"
You could also make the divider a user defined value of the formater object and maybe pick '%' as a default value: std::cout << formatob(v, "[ %, % ]"); std::cout << formatob(v, "[ |, | ]", '|' ); Thus you could ignore the escape-problem completely. Andreas Pokorny