Introduction

This is readme file for char_view - immutable string view class with compile-time processing with support for C++ string literals, std::strings and char buffers. Library is currently implemented as header-only solution.

License

Software is published under BSD license, see license.txt for details.

Project home

https://github.com/vpiotr/char_view

Purpose

• for lightweight string literal handling in C++ way (with functions from std::string)
• to support compile-time properties (length, hash) and search methods (find, contains, equals, etc)
• to support strings in switch statement

Benefits

• allows compile-time string function calculations:

    using namespace sbt;
    
    // check if string has prefix "std::"
    constexpr bool HasStdPrefix(const char_view &value) {
        return value.starts_with("std::"_cv);
    }
  
    // assert calculated in compile time
    bool TestPrefix() {
        constexpr char_view s1("std::list");
        Assert(HasStdPrefix(s1), "HasStdPrefix");
  
        return true;
    }
  

• passing parameter as literal does not involve deep copying - has complexity = O(1)

• allows using strings in switch statement:

    bool is_command_ok(const std::string &str) 
    {
        switch (char_view(str.c_str()).hash_code()) 
        {
            case char_view("clear").hash_code():
            case char_view("print").hash_code():
            case char_view("list").hash_code():
                break;
            default:
                return false;
        }
        return true;
    }
  

• implements special string literal for easy construction:

    constexpr auto s1 = "Test string"_cv;       
  

Other features

• size of any char_view object is 8 for GCC x32 (size_t + one pointer)
• does not use dynamic memory allocation in all cases when std::string is not involved
• range checking & throwing on error is optional - implemented as policies (template parameters)
• works with various char types: char, wchar_t, char16_t, char32_t
• can be used with literals, char arrays, zstrings & std::string

Supported environments

• compiler: any compiler with C++11 support (constexpr required)
• tested with GCC 4.8.1 with C++11 support active (-std=c++11)
• test build project prepared in Code::Blocks 13

External dependencies

• just C++ standard library, including std::basic_string

Performance

In cases where code can be calculated in compile time (literals processing) functions using char_view will be much much faster than any other functions. In best cases functions return just single value calculated during compilation.

Known issues

• not all overloads of std::string are implemented for functions like find_zzz (substr should be enough)
• class does not check if provided "char *" pointer is literal or something else, so any char pointer can be provided and memory control must be done elsewhere

Other similar efforts

• articles
  • Constants and Constant Expressions in C++11 - Mikhail Semenov, 2012 - article describing constexpr
  • Parsing strings at compile-time — Part I - Andrzej Krzemieñski, 2011 - article describing how to employ constexpr for string processing
• papers
  • N4236, std::basic_string_literal - standard proposition by Michael Price, 2014
  • N4121, std::string_literal - Andrew Tomazos, 2014
  • c++14 proposal - string_view
• experimental standard part(?), excluded from C++14
  • std::experimental::basic_string_view
• open source solutions
  • constexpr_string - compile time string processing library
  • char_view<> at sourceforge - thread-safe, immutable string class by Maxim Yegorushkin
  • Boost string_literal - literal wrapper by Andrey Semashev
  • Boost char_view - class for testing(?) - by Gennadiy Rozental
  • Chromium.org StringPiece
  • MNMLSTC Core string_view
  • Bloomberg bslstl::StringRef

Contact information

• Google+
• LinkedIn

Documentation

To build documentation, use Code::Blocks 13 and command:

DoxyBlocks \ Extract documentation

Output will be generated into: "./help/html/" directory in html format.

Release History

See the CHANGELOG.