Re: A beginner's string/ostream question

From:
Bart van Ingen Schenau <bart@ingen.ddns.info.invalid>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Wed, 6 Feb 2013 08:09:53 CST
Message-ID:
<ket8ec$a09$2@dont-email.me>
On Wed, 06 Feb 2013 01:09:46 -0600, James Moe wrote:

Hello,
  I thought to replace some C code with equivalent C++ for formatting
text to output; the code is inside of a processing loop. My C++ attempt
usually ends with an empty string.
  Where have I gone awry?


<snip>

----[ C++ attempt to emulate it ]----
string msg1, msg2;
std::ostringstream stro(msg1);


Your failure is in misunderstanding what the line above does.
It does *not* create a stream that uses msg1 as its buffer. Instead, it
creates a stream that starts out with the same contents as msg1 has.

msg2 = string(" messages in [") +
       string(foldname) +
       string("]");
if ((0 == nmsgs2) || (nmsgs2 < nmsgs1))
  stro << " Reindexed " << std::setw(4) << nmsgs1 << msg2;
else
   stro << " Reindexed " << std::setw(4) << nmsgs1
        << " of " << std::setw(4) << nmsgs2
    << "(" << std::setw(3) << ((nmsgs1 * 100) / nmsgs2) << "%)" <<
msg2;

To get the stream contents into msg1, you need
  msg1 = stro.str();
here.

I would have written this code as

    std::ostringstream stro;
    if ((0 == nmsgs2) || (nmsgs2 < nmsgs1))
    {
        stro << " Reindexed " << std::setw(4) << nmsgs1;
    }
    else
    {
        stro << " Reindexed " << std::setw(4) << nmsgs1
             << " of " << std::setw(4) << nmsgs2
             << " (" << std::setw(3) << ((nmsgs1*100)/nmsgs2) << "%)";
    }
    stro << " messages in [" << foldname << "]";
    std::string msg1 = stro.str();

The main difference is that I also build the second part in the stream,
instead of using string concatenation and pushing that result into the
stream.

Bart v Ingen Schenau

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