Re: [boost] [string_ref] type erasure to support arbitrary strings

On 30/01/13 14:16, Andreas Pokorny wrote:

Thats why I would prefer a facility that only requires that the source string is a forward range of characters in an arbitrary encoding.

I do not think that it makes sense to only address contiguous sequences of characters.

In practice strings are always stored contiguously, whatever the string type (std::string, Qt or whatever). Making it work with arbitrary forward iterators would have a huge unnecessary overhead. There might be a slight use case for chunked strings, but it's definitely not necessary to go the arbitrary forward iterator route.