id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc
12368	Improve property_tree documentation for path_of	harris.pc@…	Sebastian Redl	"There is no documentation on the path_of system,

I did find this helpful email:
http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2009/06/152883.php

It would be great if something like that were in the official documentation.

In the end, I managed to create my own extension for storing a tree of filenames,
here is the key code, just in case you feel its a good example for the documentation.

(Code is still not fully tested)


{{{
// a custom path-string,
// I am not using fs::path because I need to treat a directory and a file
// differently in terms of the name, where
// a directory has a / on the end of its name.
// This allows me to have a tree with a file and folder existing in the tree
// at the same time (the file may have been replaced with the folder, so one
// is deleted and the other is created).
//
class PathString
{
   string filename;
public:
   PathString( string const& p ) : filename(p) {}

   bool is_dir() const { return not empty() and filename[filename.size()-1] == '/'; }

   string const& str() const { return filename; }

   bool empty() const { return filename.empty(); }

   bool operator<( PathString const& b ) const
   {
      return filename < b.filename;
   }

   bool operator==( PathString const& b ) const
   {
      return filename == b.filename;
   }
};


   

namespace boost {
   namespace property_tree {

      // specialisation of path_of for PathString
      template <>
      struct path_of<PathString>
      {
         struct type
         {
            std::string filename;
            std::string::size_type start, size;

         public:
            type( std::string const& s ) :
               filename(s),
               start(0),
               size(filename.size())
            {}

            std::string dump() const
            {
               return filename.substr(start);
            }

            bool empty() const
            {
               return start == size;
            }

            // aka pop_front() and return the fragment
            // modifies this value
            std::string reduce()
            {
               assert(not empty());

               std::string::size_type next_sep = filename.find('/', start);

               // no separator, or separator found at the end
               if (next_sep == std::string::npos or next_sep+1 == size)
               {
                  std::string part;
                  part.swap(filename);
                  return part;
               }

               // include the trailing separator
               std::string::size_type old_start = start;
               start = next_sep+1;

               return filename.substr(old_start, start-old_start);
            }


            bool single() const
            {
               // will return true if empty, it should not be asked for empty paths anyway

               // it is a ""single"" path if there is a slash BEFORE the last character.
               // if the last character is /, then it can be a ""single"" directory.
               //
               // so check if idx < filename.size()-1 --therefore--> idx+1 < filename.size()
               std::string::size_type idx = filename.find('/');
               return idx == std::string::npos or idx+1 < filename.size();
            }
         };
      };
}}}"	Feature Requests	new	To Be Determined	property_tree	Boost 1.61.0	Problem