header
<string>
C++ Strings library
The C++ strings library provides the definitions of the
basic_string class, which is a class template specifically designed to manipulate strings of characters of any character type. It also includes two specific instantiations:
string and
wstring, which respectively use
char and
wchar_t as character types.
- string
- String class (class)
The characteristics of characters taken into consideration in these classes are not only the type itself, but also a set of traits. These traits are defined by specializing the class template
char_traits for the specific type. Default specifications exist for both
char and
wchar_t:
- char_traits
- Character traits (class template)
This reference uses as a base the
string class, even though this is only one of the possible template instantiations (we believe this provides a better readability):
A set of global functions provide some additional functionality for strings to interact either with other
string objects or with objects of other types, mainly through the overloading of operators:
- operator+
- Add strings (function)
- swap
- Swap contents of two strings (function
)
- comparison operators
- String comparison operators (function
)
The header also declares some functions that extend the functionality of streams to string objects:
- getline
- Get line from stream (function
)
- operator<<
- Insert string into stream (function
)
- operator>>
- Extract string from istream (function
)
Notice that some other operators are also overloaded as members of class
string (
+=,
=,
[]).