eliminate junk from std.string?

[Lars T. Kyllingstad]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 03:41:51 -0500, bearophile wrote:

> Lars T. Kyllingstad:
> 
>> My suggestions for things to remove:
>> 
>> hexdigits, digits, octdigits, lowercase, letters, uppecase, whitespace
>>  - What are these arrays useful for?
>> 
>> capwords()
>>  - It tries to do too much.
>> 
>> zfill()
>>  - The ljustify(),rjustify(), and center() functions
>>    should instead take an optional padding character that defaults to a
>>    space.
>>  
>> maketrans(), translate()
>>  - I don't even understand what these do.
>> 
>> inPattern(), countchars(), removechars()
>>  - Pattern matching is std.regex's charter.
>> 
>> squeeze(), succ(), tr(), soundex(), column()
>>  - I am having a very hard time imagining myself ever
>>    using these functions...
> 
> I agree with about nothing you have said :-)
> 
> How much string processing you do day by day? I am using most of those
> things... If you are used in using Python or Ruby you probably find most
> of those things useful. If Andrei removes arrays like lowercase,
> letters, uppecase, I will have to write them myself in code.
> ljustify(),rjustify(), and center() are very useful, even if they may be
> improved in some ways. maketrans() and translate() (as other things)
> come from Python string functions, and I have used them a hundred times
> in string processing code. I have used squeeze() some times. soundex is
> not hurting, because even if it's not commonly necessary, its name is
> easy to understand and it's not easy to miss for something different, so
> it doesn't add much noise to the library. And I've seen that it's easy
> to implement soundex wrongly, while the one in the std.string is
> correct.

I think you may have misunderstood some of my suggestions.  For instance, 
I never proposed to remove ljustify(), rjustify(), and center().  Rather, 
I would have them take an extra 'padding' parameter, so we can eliminate 
zfill().

  Before:  auto s = zfill("123", 6);
  After:   auto s = rjustify("123", 6, '0');

As for the other things I suggested, well... those are the things i vote 
to remove from std.string.  If they only get that one vote, they stay. ;)


By the way, since you seem to be using these things quite often, maybe 
you can answer this:

1. What are the hexdigits, digits, octdigits, lowercase, letters, 
uppercase, and whitespace arrays useful for?  The only thing I can think 
of is to check whether a character belongs to one of them, but I think 
that is better done with the std.ctype functions.

2. What do maketrans() and translate() do?  (A brief example would be 
nice.)

-Lars