I've been working on a little project where I've had to doing lots of string processing, so I decided to put together a string type that wraps up boost.regex and boost.string_algo into a string type. I also remember a discussion in the LWG about whether the various string algorithms should be built in or not -- well consider this a test -- personally I find it easier built into the string than as standalone functions. You can download from the string/text processing part of the vault: http://tinyurl.com/dbcye Below is the summary and motivating code example. Enjoy, Jeff -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Souped up string class that includes fancy query, replacement, and conversion functions. This type has the following main goals: * Is a drop-in replacement convertable to std::string and std::wstring * Provide case conversions and case insensitive comparison * Provide white space triming functions * Provide a split functions to parse a string into pieces base on string or regex * Provide sophisticated text replacement functions based on strings or regex * Provide append and insert functions for types Overall, this class is mostly a convience wrapper around functions available in boost.string_algo and boost.regex. This is best illustrated with some code: super_string s(" (456789) [123] 2006-10-01 abcdef "); s.to_upper(); cout << s << endl; s.trim(); //lop of the whitespace on both sides cout << s << endl; double dbl = 1.23456; s.append(dbl); //append any streamable type s+= " "; cout << s << endl; date d(2006, Jul, 1); s.insert_at(28, d); //insert any streamable type cout << s << endl; //find the yyyy-mm-dd date format if (s.contains_regex("\\d{4}-\\d{2}-\\d{2}")) { //replace parens around digits with square brackets [the digits] s.replace_all_regex("\\(([0-9]+)\\)", "__[$1]__"); cout << s << endl; //split the string on white space to process parts super_string::string_vector out_vec; unsigned int count = s.split_regex("\\s+", out_vec); if (count) { for(int i=0; i < out_vec.size(); ++i) { out_vec[i].replace_first("__",""); //get rid of first __ in string cout << i << " " << out_vec[i] << endl; } } } //wide strings too... wsuper_string ws(L" hello world "); ws.trim_left(); wcout << ws << endl; Expected output is: (456789) [123] 2006-10-01 ABCDEF (456789) [123] 2006-10-01 ABCDEF (456789) [123] 2006-10-01 ABCDEF1.23456 (456789) [123] 2006-10-01 2006-Jul-01 ABCDEF1.23456 __[456789]__ [123] 2006-10-01 2006-Jul-01 ABCDEF1.23456 0 [456789]__ 1 [123] 2 2006-10-01 3 2006-Jul-01 4 ABCDEF1.23456 hello world