[cpp-netlib-devel] Dependence on std::string

[Glyn M. <gly...@gm...>]

Guys,

I've been giving a little thought to something Dean mentioned in his last
message about using std::string in the network library.

The first thing I thought of was that Dean stated that "everything is a
template".  Apart of course from std::string.  I have created a branch in
SVN named gxm) which replaces all references to std::string with an extra
template parameter.  Happily, this passes all the original tests (with an
additional template specialization so that const char * is converted to a
std::string).  However, this creates a problem (certainly with GCC) because
the wchar_t typedef is the same as char and its not possible to overload
const wchar_t * in the same way.  So the following code will not compile:

wmessage wmsg;
wmsg << header(L"wide characters");

Another thing I see is that boost filesystem and boost program_options have
dealt with a very similar problem to this.  But if we use the same approach
(see the file "boost/detail/utf8_codecvt_facet.hpp" )  then we'd have to
accept the use of a cpp source file, meaning we will no longer have a header
only library.

What do others think about this?

G