Recent changes to feature-requests

ff::main::invoke()

2012-02-07T07:24:12Z

a la Pantheios::Extras::Main

ffout,fferrr conveniance functions

2012-01-17T16:38:56Z

Would you consider adding conveniance functions for printing to stdout/stderr using fastformat?

I created my own convenience header called ffout.hpp

which defines
ffout(...)
ffoutln(...)
fferr(...)
fferrln(...)

which call the relevant function
fastformat::fmt(std::cout,...)

build system improvements

2011-12-22T22:36:46Z

Hi there,

The fastformat library seems really great, however I had a lot of issues getting things compiled and working. In the end, I decided to scrap your build system entirely, and just compile the library myself using cmake.

I wanted to make a wrapper that would build/install fastformat according to the specification of our groups build system:
http://pods.sourceforge.net

Unfortunately, fastformat does not conform to any of the common standards for compiling and installing public facing libraries and headers which makes it challenging to incorporate/use in larger software projects.

- the build system doesn't support "installing" to a desired location, instead it uses environment variables to "install"
- the default build system requires you to run make from a compiler specific build directory, which makes automated compiling/installing difficult
- It outputs a library name with a compiler specific name, which makes writing other Makefiles that depend on fastformat complicated/difficult. This would be helped by generating a pkg-config file that would make it easier to programatically get the required link/include flags
- the 6K line machine generated makefile is totally uninterpretable/undebuggable for users who have issues compiling (such as myself). Could you separate the building of the core library from the tests and examples? It was hard to tell what parts are critical/necessary, and which were random tests/examples. I think it would also make sense to not build the tests/examples/non-core functionality by default.

Basically, what I'd like is for fastformat to follow the standard build/install pattern of:
# unzip; ./configure; make; make install
which would install things to the system path or a user specified install prefix.

Have you considered using cmake? I think that using it would make things easier to maintain and improve portability, at the expense of adding a very common/minor dependency. The current build system seems like it would be a lot of work to maintain and keep up with changes to compilers, systems and whatnot, and it looks like there is a lot of re-implimenting the wheel going on.

If you're interested, you can checkout the end result of my dabbling here:
https://svn.csail.mit.edu/rrg_pods/wrapper-pods/FastFormat/
It works on linux (ubuntu 11.10 and 10.10), and should work on other versions of unix including Macs.

thanks!
-=Abe

A utility fn to convert strs w \n to the OS NL sequence

2011-08-12T04:53:53Z

Currently, the string inserter inserts \r\n in Windows. This is not (necessarily) wanted, since may be building the string up in levels.

MFC CArchive sink

2011-02-11T04:49:26Z

TSIA

MFC CFile sink

2011-02-11T04:49:11Z

TSIA

Windows' file HANDLE sink

2011-02-11T04:48:51Z

TSIA

Support for escaping of nested placeholder markers

2011-01-05T14:50:33Z

I would like to use a document or message template which can be loaded from a content management system or file/object data base for example in a format string that is passed to your function "fastformat::fmt". These input data can contain characters which will be interpreted by your parsing engine for its own processing purposes.
http://www.fastformat.org/documentation/main.html#section__introduction

A couple of such document templates will also contain source code examples for programming languages that use curly braces in their syntax to enclose code scopes or variable names.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curly_braces#Curly_brackets_.7B_.7D

Would you like to add an utility function which provides the desired quoting or escaping for (nested) placeholder, field or parameter markers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_quotation
http://blog.opensourceopportunities.com/2007/10/nested-nested-quotes.html

Clarifications for parsing interfaces

2011-01-05T09:20:33Z

The class "fastformat::format_parsing_exception" is scantily described.
http://www.fastformat.org/documentation/classfastformat_1_1format__parsing__exception.html

Your article "C++ and format_iterator" (from 2010-06-02) explains some details.
http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/225300162

I miss descriptions about interfaces and (base) classes and their relationships for a key feature like parsing/data analysis.
Would you like to extend your published explanations?

Make markers configurable for placeholder processing

2011-01-04T16:48:06Z

It seems that the documentation for your function "fastformat::fmt" is still incomplete. But I see in your source code examples there and in your ACCU articles that a per cent sign, square brackets or curly braces mark parts of the format string which will be replaced by data that corresponds to various syntax and semantics.

I would appreciate that markers can consists of multiple characters and strings.

I imagine that your class library can benefit from experiences out of application areas like the following.
1. literate programming
2. domain-specific modelling
3. multi-lingual parsing

Would you like to add support for detailed configuration of placeholder (or field/parameter) markers?