Converting bool to text in C++

Question

Maybe this is a dumb question, but is there any way to convert a boolean value to a string such that 1 turns to \"true\" and 0 turns to \"false\"? I could just use an if st

Answer 1

C++ has proper strings so you might as well use them. They're in the standard header string. #include to use them. No more strcat/strcpy buffer overruns; no more missing null terminators; no more messy manual memory management; proper counted strings with proper value semantics.

C++ has the ability to convert bools into human-readable representations too. We saw hints at it earlier with the iostream examples, but they're a bit limited because they can only blast the text to the console (or with fstreams, a file). Fortunately, the designers of C++ weren't complete idiots; we also have iostreams that are backed not by the console or a file, but by an automatically managed string buffer. They're called stringstreams. #include to get them. Then we can say:

std::string bool_as_text(bool b)
{
    std::stringstream converter;
    converter << std::boolalpha << b;   // flag boolalpha calls converter.setf(std::ios_base::boolalpha)
    return converter.str();
}

Of course, we don't really want to type all that. Fortunately, C++ also has a convenient third-party library named Boost that can help us out here. Boost has a nice function called lexical_cast. We can use it thus:

boost::lexical_cast(my_bool)

Now, it's true to say that this is higher overhead than some macro; stringstreams deal with locales which you might not care about, and create a dynamic string (with memory allocation) whereas the macro can yield a literal string, which avoids that. But on the flip side, the stringstream method can be used for a great many conversions between printable and internal representations. You can run 'em backwards; boost::lexical_cast("true") does the right thing, for example. You can use them with numbers and in fact any type with the right formatted I/O operators. So they're quite versatile and useful.

And if after all this your profiling and benchmarking reveals that the lexical_casts are an unacceptable bottleneck, that's when you should consider doing some macro horror.