Re: querry related to STL map..

From:
"kanze" <kanze@gabi-soft.fr>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
28 Sep 2006 09:32:09 -0400
Message-ID:
<1159438640.604275.90350@d34g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>
RenjithMohan wrote:

char *p = new char[3];

Here you are wrong. In order to have "May" you need size 4 to
accomodate the null terminator.

strcpy(p, "May");
int it = m1[p]; // returns 0 .. instead of 31 ....


Basically your comparator for the map is wrong. string
literals have the same type and may be ordered according to
the < operator. For char*, the default less<> comparator is
no longer acceptable..

The correct way to order the keys, if it is char* is to have a
custom comparator for the map.

template<class _Ty>
    struct comp_function
        : public binary_function<_Ty, _Ty, bool>
    { // functor for operator<
    bool operator()(const _Ty& _Left, const _Ty& _Right) const
        { // apply strcmp to operands
            return (strcmp(_Left, _Right)< 0);
        }
    };

Just one question: why on earth do you make this a template,
since it will fail to instantiate unless _Ty is char* or char
const*?j

      //Notice how we have given our comparator
       map<char *,int, comp_function<char*> > m1;


And there is still one problem left:

    m1.begin()[ 0 ] = 'z' ;

Looks fine to me, and the compiler won't complain. But
supposing the initializations below, I rather doubt that
m1["zanuary"] will return 31 after this.

The obvious solution is to simply write:

    map< std::string, int > m1 ;

and be done with it. If you really insist on C style strings,
then at the very least:

    map< char const*, int, comp_function > m1 ;

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