Christian Henning wrote:
The difference to a "normal" iterator is that I have two distinct functionalities that I need to squeeze into the standard iterator interface.
I don't follow; what two functionalities?
I would like to hear your opinion on how this could be accomplished!
I imagine your line-by-line reading iterator would look something like (PSEUDO-CODE!!!): class line_by_line_iterator { buffer_t& buffer; public: const buffer_t& operator*() const { return buffer; } void operator++() { format_specific_read_one_line_into(buffer); } }; I'd do it using iterator_facade. A case that this fails to manage efficiently is when your format-specific implementation has an efficient way to skip forward without actually decoding. This is not something that I've ever had to worry about, but I think you could do it easily enough by adding a flag and doing the read lazily in operator*. Regards, Phil.