Well, the fishing trip did not work out. :-\ Therefore, I would like to request a formal review for the Boost.String.Convert functionality. I've uploaded the file called boost-string-convert.zip to the Vault (http://www.boostpro.com/vault/index.php). It has the conversion-related header, the test/usage executable and the documentation (MS Word, HTML). Compiled on Linux and Visual Studio 2008. At the bottom is the "motivation" introductory section from the docs. There is very little of actually code, so you might just read it rather that suffering through my document mumble. Currently-known issues. 1) The attention was given to the behavior (to provide simple/advanced conversion-failure check, throw/no-throw behavior, locale, formatting) and not to the efficiency. I am sure people will come up with ways to run this damn thing much faster. I am very much looking forward to your contributions as I do not really feel I am any good at it. 2) I've implemented the recently suggested boost::stirng::convert() interface but that might need some additional work to handle corner cases correctly. I promise to look into it in due course. I would like to thank everyone participated in the lexica_cast and boost::string::convert-related discussions and expressing their views and opinions and coming up with suggestions. All of them were heard, considered and much and truly appreciated. I apologize if in the end it does not look out as you might like to see it. I swear, your contributions were not in vain. Thanks, Vladimir. Motivation I had a need for a convenient and uniform facility to convert values to and from a literal textual form. Such a need is common when converting between internal (to a program) data types and their external representations. Typical applications would be reading of configuration files, packing and unpacking internal data to and from, say, XML, etc. The boost::lexical_cast looked very promising and was the preferred solution compared to others (such as C functions, std::stringstream, etc., see the lexical_cast documentation for more discussion about alternatives). Unfortunately, I needed functionality beyond what lexical_cast was providing (configurable throw/no-throw behavior, formatting support, locale support, etc.). After discussions on the Boost developers list and with the lexical_cast author (Kevlin Henney) and the maintainer (Alexander Nasonov) it was collectively decided that the required functionality extensions were not compatible with the idea of what lexical_cast embodied and a more dedicated family of conversion functions with richer interfaces was needed. That decision resulted in the development of the following header-only string-conversion library described in this document: boost::string::convert() The interface is explicit about its purpose ? string-related -- string-to-type and type-to-string -- conversions. It builds on the lexical_cast past experience, offers the already familiar conversion functionality and more: · throw and no-throw conversion-failure handling behavior; · support for the default value to be returned when conversion fails; · formatting support based on the standard (or user-defined) manipulators (like std::hex, std::scientific, etc.); · locale support; · support for various (boost::range-compliant) char and wchar_t-based containers (std::string, std::wstring, char const*, wchar_t const*, char array[], std::vector<char>, etc.); · no DefaultConstructibility requirement for the Target type; · room to grow.