Note: This paper was adopted into draft C++14 on Saturday at the Bristol UK ISO C++ meeting.

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Document number: N3654

Date: 2013-04-19

Quoted Strings Library Proposal (Revision 2)

by Beman Dawes

Excerpt:

The proposed quoted stream I/O manipulator places delimiters, defaulted to double-quote ("), around strings on output, and strips off the delimiters on input. This ensures strings with embedded white space round-trip as desired. For example,

std::stringstream ss;
std::string original = "foolish me";
std::string round_trip;

ss << quoted(original);
ss >> quoted(round_trip);

std::cout << original;     // outputs: foolish me
std::cout << round_trip;   // outputs: foolish me

assert(original == round_trip); // assert will not fire

If the string contains the delimiter character, on output that character will be preceded by an escape character, default to backslash (\), as will the escape character itself:

std::cout << quoted("She said \"Hi!\"");  // outputs: "She said \"Hi!\""