Marshall. low <mclow.lists. at> gmail.com> writes:
Please let me know what you think!
As probably everyone, we have our own device for this. Here are some points and experience we gathered. 1. This class is essentially just an iterator_ range<char*> (modulo template for const/wchar_t), so it should either inherit from it or have corresponding converting ctors/operators. In this sense Olaf/Gennadiy's remarks are pretty valid. OTOH size is needed very frequently and having it precomputed is a good thing, so conversion approach seems to be better (but then we lose passing by reference as iterator_range, type_traits etc). I'm not sure what's more important. 2. Given the above, the name is misleading as it's not a reference to std::string. We use name char_range. 3. It's worth having a static constructor 'literal' (templated with size) to construct char_ranges from literals - as the compiler knows their size in compile time (minus zero terminator). It can be a constexpr too. Same manner - static function 'from_array', embrasing an array of chars in whole, assuming there is no zero terminator - useful for working with structures representing messages in char-based protocols with fixed-width fields. 4. (hack) We had to add a member function 'assign' (this is just operator=) to make boost::tokenizer return char_ranges. I don't like this part at all as it contradicts the meaning of say std::vector::assign, so I'd prefer another solution, probably in form of a customization point in boost::tokenizer. Thanks, Maxim