Re: best efficient and readable way to concatenate strings (or the best trade-offs)

From:
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Erik_Wikstr=F6m?= <Erik-wikstrom@telia.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:05:28 GMT
Message-ID:
<ssCdi.2431$ZA.1160@newsb.telia.net>
On 2007-06-18 22:32, Diego Martins wrote:

Since C++ (and STL) have many ways to do string concatenation, I want
to hear (read) from you how you do to concatenate strings with other
strings and other types. The approaches I know are:


[snip ostringstream]

-- string::operator+
most advantage is we can built all the string using a one liner and
passing the result to string const &, but:
* we have to ensure all members are of string type
* to achieve that, we can use boost::lexical_cast or custom functions
to convert our types/classes to string

int n;
float x;
...
notebook.add("we bought " + toString(n) + " items at " + toString(x) +
" price");
// one liner!! :)

(but is there actually a gain doing that?)

and we have to implement toString(). which way is better?
lexical_cast? ostringstream? overloading (or specializing) for each
involved types? (ints and floats can be converted faster using some
hacks)


If you are mainly concerned with user defined types you can implement

   std::string operator+(const std::string&, const myType&)
and
   std::string operator+(const char*, const MyType&)

which would make it possible to write things like:

   std::cout << "Value: " + myVal + "\n";

where myVal is of type MyType.

--
Erik Wikstr?m

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