format-cout.hpp File Reference

Automatically use custom string conversion in C++ stream output. More...

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Description

Automatically use custom string conversion in C++ stream output.

This diagnostics facility allows just to dump any object into cout or cerr. Pointers will be detected, checked for NULL and printed as address, followed by the representation of the pointee. When the displayed entity defines an operator string(), this custom string conversion will be used (suppressing any exceptions, of course). As fallback, a simplified type string is printed.

policy

What shall be expected from a generic toString conversion? It should be minimal, it should be transparent and it should always work and deliver a string, irrespective of the circumstances. By extension, this means that we do not want to differentiate much between values, references and pointers, which also means, we do not want to indicate pointers explicitly (just signal NULL, when encountered). The situation is slightly different for the ostream inserter; in a modern GUI application, there isn't much use for STDOUT and STDERR, beyond error messages and unit testing. Thus, we can strive at building a more convenient flavour here, which does indeed even show the address of pointers.

See also

FormatCOUT_test

FormatHelper_test

generic string conversion helper

frontend for boost::format, printf-style

Definition in file format-cout.hpp.

#include "lib/format-obj.hpp"
#include <string>
#include <iostream>

Namespaces
namespace	std
	STL namespace.
namespace	std::anonymous_namespace{format-cout.hpp}

Typedefs
template<typename X >
using	enable_StringConversion = lib::meta::enable_if< lib::meta::use_StringConversion4Stream< X > >

Functions
template<typename _CharT , typename _Traits , typename X , typename = enable_StringConversion<X>>
basic_ostream< _CharT, _Traits > &	operator<< (basic_ostream< _CharT, _Traits > &os, X const &obj)
	generic overload to use custom string conversions in output
template<typename _CharT , typename _Traits , typename X , typename = enable_StringConversion<X>>
basic_ostream< _CharT, _Traits > &	operator<< (basic_ostream< _CharT, _Traits > &os, X const *ptr)
	generic overload to pretty-print any pointer in output