There are many libraries out there that do all sorts of things and that includes those like this fast formatting library for C++. The library is C++ Format. This is a library that is designed to be a subtle replacement for the traditional printf and sprintf C language constructs. It is that which we will be taking a peek into in today’s episode of Did you know?
Did You Know There is a Fast Formatting Library for C++ Output?
The answer should be yes if not eventually, yes! C++ Format pronounced cppformat is an open-source formatting library for C++. We know printf can be an unsafe method of printing to the standard output. C++ Format therefore comes in as a worthy alternative to printf and an alternative to IOStreams. Other alternative include loki::SPrintf and boost::format.
Variadic templates feature crom C++11 can be used where supported otherwise variadic functions are emulated by generating a set of lightweight wrappers. Some of the features include functions that perform formatting and writing of the results to a file. You can also leave out the file and write directly to the stdout. String literals can also be formatted similar to Python programming language.
C++ Format comes with a concatenation-based Write API. This provides a fast stateless alternative to IOStreams and functions similarly to std::cout. The library is also type safe and comes with automatic memory management. This helps prevents buffer overflows.
C++ Format can used to compile on Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems running the latest versions of GCC 4.4 and later, and Visual C++ 2010 or later. The usage is simple with the entire library consisting of a single header file and a single source file with no dependencies.
As you go over to Github to get yourself a copy of this library, you can take a look at the following which are good examples on how the C++ Format can be used:
Ref:
http://cppformat.github.io/latest/index.html
http://zverovich.net/2013/09/07/integer-to-string-conversion-in-cplusplus.html
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