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Data Information, Constructors, and Odds and Ends

Constructors can be described in terms of the effects they have. Because the private portions of a class can be implementation dependent, these effects should be described in terms of information available as part of the public interface. Table F.1 lists several methods whose return values can be used to describe the effects of constructors and of other methods. Note that much of the terminology is from the STL.

Table F.1. Some string Data Methods

Be careful of the differences among begin(), rend(), data(), and c_str(). All relate to the first character in a string, but in different ways. The begin() and rend() methods return iterators, which are generalizations of pointers, as described in Chapter 16, “The string Class and the Standard Template Library.” In particular, begin() returns a model of a forward iterator, and rend() returns a copy of a reverse iterator. Both refer to the actual string managed by the string object. (Because the string class uses dynamic memory allocation, the actual string contents need not be inside the object, so we use the term manage to describe the relationship between object and string.) You can use the methods that return iterators with the iterator-based algorithms of the STL. For example, you can use the STL reverse() function to reverse the contents of a string:

string word;

cin >> word;

reverse(word.begin(), word.end());

The data() and c_str() methods, on the other hand, do return ordinary pointers. Furthermore, the returned pointers point to the first element of an array that holds the string characters. This array can but need not be a copy of the original string managed by the string object. (The internal representation used by the string object can be an array, but it doesn’t have to be.) Because it is possible that the returned pointers point to the original data, they are const, so they can’t be used to alter the data. Also the pointers are not guaranteed to be valid after the string is modified; this reflects that they may point to the original data. The difference between data() and c_str() is that the array c_str() points to is terminated with a null character (or equivalent), whereas data() just guarantees that the actual string characters are present. Thus, the c_str() method can be used, for example, as an argument to a function that expects to receive a C-style string:

string file("tofu.man");

ofstream outFile(file.c_str());

Similarly, data() and size() could be used with a function that expects to receive a pointer to an array element and a value that represents the number of elements to process:

string vampire("Do not stake me, oh my darling!");

int vlad = byte_check(vampire.data(), vampire.size());

A C++ implementation could choose to represent a string object’s string as a dynamically allocated C-style string and to implement the forward iterator as a char * pointer. In that case, the implementation could choose to have begin(), data(), and c_str() all return the same pointer. But it could just as legitimately (if not as easily) return references to three different data objects.

C++11 has 11 constructors for the basic_string template class, up from the six of C++98, and one destructor:

explicit basic_string(const Allocator& a = Allocator());

basic_string(const charT* s, const Allocator& a = Allocator());

basic_string(const charT* s, size_type n, const Allocator& a = Allocator());

basic_string(const basic_string& str);

basic_string(const basic_string& str, const Allocator&);

basic_string(const basic_string& str, size_type pos,

    size_type n = npos, const Allocator& a = Allocator());

basic_string(basic_string&& str) noexcept;

basic_string(const basic_string&& str, const Allocator&);

basic_string(size_type n, charT c, const Allocator& a = Allocator());

template

basic_string(InputIterator begin, InputIterator end,

    const Allocator& a = Allocator());

basic_string(initializer_list, const Allocator& = Allocator());

~basic_string();

Some of the increase in constructors comes from handling arguments differently. For example, C++98 had this copy constructor:

basic_string(const basic_string& str, size_type pos = 0,

    size_type n = npos, const Allocator& a = Allocator());

C++11 replaces it with three constructors—the second, third, and fourth items in the preceding list. This allows the most common uses of the C++98 version to be coded more efficiently. The really new additions are the move constructors (those with rvalue references, as discussed in Chapter 18, “Visiting with the New C++ Standard”) and the constructor with the initializer_list parameter.

Note that most of the constructors have an argument of the following form:

const Allocator& a = Allocator()