On Wed, 2011-03-30 at 18:16 +0300, Matthew Chambers wrote:
Does that mean lexical_cast is orphaned? I'd like to see lexical_cast have optimized conversions for string->number and number->string (template specializations using strtol/strtod; or optionally using the spirit-based construe_cast). Being able to pass ios flags to control the format (i.e. boolalpha) would be nice too.
Which reminds me - lexical_cast error messages are not very informative, so in order to save debugging time I've used local variants like this: template <typename T> T number_cast(const std::string & theValue) { try { return boost::lexical_cast<T>(theValue); } catch(boost::bad_lexical_cast &) { throw std::runtime_error("number_cast failed to convert '"+theValue+"' to " + number_name<T>()); } } with template <typename T> inline const char * number_name() { return "a number"; } template <> inline const char * number_name<float>() { return "float"; } template <> inline const char * number_name<int>() { return "int"; } ... My template programming is not much beyond the level displayed above, so I will not venture to suggest how a feature like this could or should be incorporated into boost::lexical_cast, but I'd be very happy if someone would be interested and skilled enough to do so. --> Mika Heiskanen