On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 11:59:00AM +0100, John Maddock wrote: Hi,
So we make match_results implicitly convertible to it's iterator type? I'm not necessarily against that, but there are dangers: mainly as Alan stated that you can easily miss corner cases (when the regex matches a zero-length string).
I just want to add 0.02p. Maybe it would be good, to make regex match_results convertible to the iterator_range defined in the string algo library. iterator_range is used as a result of find operations, it is convertible to safe-bool and its purpose is to delimit a part of a collection. It was requested during the review of the string algo library, that this facility should be extracted and documented as a general purpose utility. It can be standardized then as a generic result of find operation. What would be the advantage? User can write iterator_range res=regex_maxch(...); if(res) { std::copy(res.begin(), res.end(), It) // or what ever } iterator_range copying is cheap, it is safe from the problem of empty match (empty is a well defined state) and there are algorithms that it can be used with. It the user does not need all the info provided by the regex match_results (which is not so uncommon) then iterator_range sufficient. regex match_results would make a logical extension to iterator_range. Regards, Pavol