C++ Cookbook: Solutions and Examples for C++ Programmers

by D. Ryan Stephens, Christopher Diggins, Jonathan Turkanis, Jeff Cogswell

Overview

Despite its highly adaptable and flexible nature, C++ is also one of the more complex programming languages to learn. Once mastered, however, it can help you organize and process information with amazing efficiency and quickness.

The C++ Cookbook will make your path to mastery much shorter. This practical, problem-solving guide is ideal if you're an engineer, programmer, or researcher writing an application for one of the legions of platforms on which C++ runs. The algorithms provided in C++ Cookbook will jump-start your development by giving you some basic building blocks that you don't have to develop on your own.

Less a tutorial than a problem-solver, the book addresses many of the most common problems you're likely encounter—whether you've been programming in C++ for years or you're relatively new to the language. Here are just some of the time-consuming tasks this book contains practical solutions for:

• Reading the contents of a directory
• Creating a singleton class
• Date and time parsing/arithmetic
• String and text manipulation
• Working with files
• Parsing XML
• Using the standard containers

Typical of O'Reilly's "Cookbook" series, C++ Cookbook is written in a straightforward format, featuring recipes that contain problem statements and code solutions, and apply not to hypothetical situations, but those that you're likely to encounter. A detailed explanation then follows each recipe in order to show you how and why the solution works. This question-solution-discussion format is a proven teaching method, as any fan of the "Cookbook" series can attest to. This book will move quickly to the top of your list of essential C++ references.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596007614
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/18/2005
Series:	Cookbooks (O'Reilly)
Pages:	592
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.19(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Ryan Stephens is a software engineer, writer, and student living in Tempe, AZ. He enjoys programming in virtually any language, especially C++. His interests include the fields of information retrieval and data mining, and pretty much anything that has to do with algorithms and large data sets. When he's not working, writing, or programming, he plays with his kids, works on his house, or goes cycling.

Christopher Diggins is a freelance software developer and writer who has been programming computers since he was "haut comme trois pommes". Christopher writes regularly for the C++ Users Journal, and is the designer of the Heron programming lanugage.

Jonathan Turkanis is the author of the Boost Iostreams library and several other open source C++ libraries covering areas including smart pointers, runtime reflection, component architectures and aspect-oriented programming. He is a Ph.D. candidate in mathematical logic at the University of California at Berkeley.

Jeff Cogswell has been programming in several languages for many years. His background was previously in telecom, writing software for such strange things as network management protocols. Lately, however, his work has focused more on web development. After spending a few years in both Florida and California, Jeff now lives in Michigan. He's holding out for some warmer weather.

Table of Contents

Preface; About the Examples; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Comments and Questions; Safari Enabled; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Building C++ Applications; 1.1 Introduction to Building; 1.1 Obtaining and Installing GCC; 1.2 Building a Simple "Hello, World" Application from the Command Line; 1.3 Building a Static Library from the Command Line; 1.4 Building a Dynamic Library from the Command Line; 1.5 Building a Complex Application from the Command Line; 1.6 Installing Boost.Build; 1.7 Building a Simple "Hello, World" Application Using Boost.Build; 1.8 Building a Static Library Using Boost.Build; 1.9 Building a Dynamic Library Using Boost.Build; 1.10 Building a Complex application Using Boost.Build; 1.11 Building a Static Library with an IDE; 1.12 Building a Dynamic Library with an IDE; 1.13 Building a Complex Application with an IDE; 1.14 Obtaining GNU make; 1.15 Building A Simple "Hello, World" Application with GNU make; 1.16 Building a Static Library with GNU Make; 1.17 Building a Dynamic Library with GNU Make; 1.18 Building a Complex Application with GNU make; 1.19 Defining a Macro; 1.20 Specifying a Command-Line Option from Your IDE; 1.21 Producing a Debug Build; 1.22 Producing a Release Build; 1.23 Specifying a Runtime Library Variant; 1.24 Enforcing Strict Conformance to the C++ Standard; 1.25 Causing a Source File to Be Linked Automatically Against a Specified Library; 1.26 Using Exported Templates; Chapter 2: Code Organization; 2.1 Introduction; 2.1 Making Sure a Header File Gets Included Only Once; 2.2 Ensuring You Have Only One Instance of a Variable Across Multiple Source Files; 2.3 Reducing #includes with Forward Class Declarations; 2.4 Preventing Name Collisions with Namespaces; 2.5 Including an Inline File; Chapter 3: Numbers; 3.1 Introduction; 3.1 Converting a String to a Numeric Type; 3.2 Converting Numbers to Strings; 3.3 Testing Whether a String Contains a Valid Number; 3.4 Comparing Floating-Point Numbers with Bounded Accuracy; 3.5 Parsing a String Containing a Number in Scientific Notation; 3.6 Converting Between Numeric Types; 3.7 Getting the Minimum and Maximum Values for a Numeric Type; Chapter 4: Strings and Text; 4.1 Introduction; 4.1 Padding a String; 4.2 Trimming a String; 4.3 Storing Strings in a Sequence; 4.4 Getting the Length of a String; 4.5 Reversing a String; 4.6 Splitting a String; 4.7 Tokenizing a String; 4.8 Joining a Sequence of Strings; 4.9 Finding Things in Strings; 4.10 Finding the nth Instance of a Substring; 4.11 Removing a Substring from a String; 4.12 Converting a String to Lower- or Uppercase; 4.13 Doing a Case-Insensitive String Comparison; 4.14 Doing a Case-Insensitive String Search; 4.15 Converting Between Tabs and Spaces in a Text File; 4.16 Wrapping Lines in a Text File; 4.17 Counting the Number of Characters, Words, and Lines in a Text File; 4.18 Counting Instances of Each Word in a Text File; 4.19 Add Margins to a Text File; 4.20 Justify a Text File; 4.21 Squeeze Whitespace to Single Spaces in a Text File; 4.22 Autocorrect Text as a Buffer Changes; 4.23 Reading a Comma-Separated Text File; 4.24 Using Regular Expressions to Split a String; Chapter 5: Dates and Times; 5.1 Introduction; 5.1 Obtaining the Current Date and Time; 5.2 Formatting a Date/Time as a String; 5.3 Performing Date and Time Arithmetic; 5.4 Converting Between Time Zones; 5.5 Determining a Day's Number Within a Given Year; 5.6 Defining Constrained Value Types; Chapter 6: Managing Data with Containers; 6.1 Introduction; 6.1 Using vectors Instead of Arrays; 6.2 Using vectors Efficiently; 6.3 Copying a vector; 6.4 Storing Pointers in a vector; 6.5 Storing Objects in a list; 6.6 Mapping strings to Other Things; 6.7 Using Hashed Containers; 6.8 Storing Objects in Sorted Order; 6.9 Storing Containers in Containers; Chapter 7: Algorithms; 7.1 Introduction; 7.1 Iterating Through a Container; 7.2 Removing Objects from a Container; 7.3 Randomly Shuffling Data; 7.4 Comparing Ranges; 7.5 Merging Data; 7.6 Sorting a Range; 7.7 Partitioning a Range; 7.8 Performing Set Operations on Sequences; 7.9 Transforming Elements in a Sequence; 7.10 Writing Your Own Algorithm; 7.11 Printing a Range to a Stream; Chapter 8: Classes; 8.1 Introduction; 8.1 Initializing Class Member Variables; 8.2 Using a Function to Create Objects (a.k.a. Factory Pattern); 8.3 Using Constructors and Destructors to Manage Resources (or RAII); 8.4 Automatically Adding New Class Instances to a Container; 8.5 Ensuring a Single Copy of a Member Variable; 8.6 Determining an Object's Type at Runtime; 8.7 Determining if One Object's Class Is a Subclass of Another; 8.8 Giving Each Instance of a Class a Unique Identifier; 8.9 Creating a Singleton Class; 8.10 Creating an Interface with an Abstract Base Class; 8.11 Writing a Class Template; 8.12 Writing a Member Function Template; 8.13 Overloading the Increment and Decrement Operators; 8.14 Overloading Arithmetic and Assignment Operators for Intuitive Class Behavior; 8.15 Calling a Superclass Virtual Function; Chapter 9: Exceptions and Safety; 9.1 Introduction; 9.1 Creating an Exception Class; 9.2 Making a Constructor Exception-Safe; 9.3 Making an Initializer List Exception-Safe; 9.4 Making Member Functions Exception-Safe; 9.5 Safely Copying an Object; Chapter 10: Streams and Files; 10.1 Introduction; 10.1 Lining Up Text Output; 10.2 Formatting Floating-Point Output; 10.3 Writing Your Own Stream Manipulators; 10.4 Making a Class Writable to a Stream; 10.5 Making a Class Readable from a Stream; 10.6 Getting Information About a File; 10.7 Copying a File; 10.8 Deleting or Renaming a File; 10.9 Creating a Temporary Filename and File; 10.10 Creating a Directory; 10.11 Removing a Directory; 10.12 Reading the Contents of a Directory; 10.13 Extracting a File Extension from a String; 10.14 Extracting a Filename from a Full Path; 10.15 Extracting a Path from a Full Path and Filename; 10.16 Replacing a File Extension; 10.17 Combining Two Paths into a Single Path; Chapter 11: Science and Mathematics; 11.1 Introduction; 11.1 Computing the Number of Elements in a Container; 11.2 Finding the Greatest or Least Value in a Container; 11.3 Computing the Sum and Mean of Elements in a Container; 11.4 Filtering Values Outside a Given Range; 11.5 Computing Variance, Standard Deviation, and Other Statistical Functions; 11.6 Generating Random Numbers; 11.7 Initializing a Container with Random Numbers; 11.8 Representing a Dynamically Sized Numerical Vector; 11.9 Representing a Fixed-Size Numerical Vector; 11.10 Computing a Dot Product; 11.11 Computing the Norm of a Vector; 11.12 Computing the Distance Between Two Vectors; 11.13 Implementing a Stride Iterator; 11.14 Implementing a Dynamically Sized Matrix; 11.15 Implementing a Constant-Sized Matrix; 11.16 Multiplying Matricies; 11.17 Computing the Fast Fourier Transform; 11.18 Working with Polar Coordinates; 11.19 Performing Arithmetic on Bitsets; 11.20 Representing Large Fixed-Width Integers; 11.21 Implementing Fixed-Point Numbers; Chapter 12: Multithreading; 12.1 Introduction; 12.1 Creating a Thread; 12.2 Making a Resource Thread-Safe; 12.3 Notifying One Thread from Another; 12.4 Initializing Shared Resources Once; 12.5 Passing an Argument to a Thread Function; Chapter 13: Internationalization; 13.1 Introduction; 13.1 Hardcoding a Unicode String; 13.2 Writing and Reading Numbers; 13.3 Writing and Reading Dates and Times; 13.4 Writing and Reading Currency; 13.5 Sorting Localized Strings; Chapter 14: XML; 14.1 Introduction; 14.1 Parsing a Simple XML Document; 14.2 Working with Xerces Strings; 14.3 Parsing a Complex XML Document; 14.4 Manipulating an XML Document; 14.5 Validating an XML Document with a DTD; 14.6 Validating an XML Document with a Schema; 14.7 Transforming an XML Document with XSLT; 14.8 Evaluating an XPath Expression; 14.9 Using XML to Save and Restore a Collection of Objects; Chapter 15: Miscellaneous; 15.1 Introduction; 15.1 Using Function Pointers for Callbacks; 15.2 Using Pointers to Class Members; 15.3 Ensuring That a Function Doesn't Modify an Argument; 15.4 Ensuring That a Member Function Doesn't Modify Its Object; 15.5 Writing an Operator That Isn't a Member Function; 15.6 Initializing a Sequence with Comma-Separated Values; Colophon;