First of all I'd like to "come out" too and say that this feature in boost would be a real joy for all of us "non boost super users" (I have quite a bunch of them all around me). I use tokenizer by copy / pasting some code, and regex is still too obscure for me to be yet at this point. I handle lexical_cast masterfully, but I never took the time to read format documentations because I never thought it could be useful fro strings. I never heard of string_algo or xpressive before today. All in all, having a class that proposes all string related algorithms in a clean interface, aimed only at strings looks like something I've been missing for years. Jeff Garland wrote:
Compare the universe of all available boost string processing free functions in string_algo, format, lexical_cast, tokenizer, regex, and
xpressive versus super_string. super_string is much smaller. And super_string can be documented without the 'noise' of all the template parameters associated with the lower level libraries.
Speaking strictly of strings, I think this is the main problem. Maybe beginning by writing a doc that teaches simply what can be done on strings, using all boost libs would be the better thing to do? Basically, that's what the super_string documentation will do. At least, I, would be very pleased to find such a tutorial, and would get a lot of use to it. The second step might be to wrap all that features in free functions (I wonder why there isn't a namespace boost::string_algo that provides all supports for strings), and maybe the third to have a class that provides a clean interface. But I'll leave that up to you boosts super users. Maybe I'm not super user enough to have a good point on this, but at least, you can be sure I'm not a lazy developer and reading docs is my hobby. I feel weird realizing that I missed a lot of strings features from boost. SeskaPeel.