Phobos strings versus C++ Boost

[Brad Anderson]

The recent discussion got me wondering how Phobos stacked up
against the C++ Boost String Algorithms library.

Some background on the design of the Boost library:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/doc/html/string_algo/design.html

TL;DR: It works somewhat like ranges.

Google Spreadsheet with the comparison: http://goo.gl/Wmotu4

I wouldn't be surprised if I missed functions that would do
things easily but I did look reasonably hard for ways to
accomplish things. Do share if you spot anything I missed but
everything should be intuitive rather than clever.

A few things stand out:

1. They have case-insensitive versions of pretty much everything.
It's not hard to do a map!toLower/toUpper in D but it's also not
obvious (nor do I know if that's actually correct in languages
outside of english).

2. Replace and erase options a very slim. Doing something like a
chain() on the results of findSplit() and what you want to inject
I guess would work for replacing but that's really not very
elegant. remove() is simply way too cumbersome to use. I guess
you could use indexOf, then indexOf again with a slice with the
first result, then pass both two a tuple in remove. That's
terrible though.

3. Doing an action several times rather than once is tricky.  As
in, there is no findAll() that returns a range of ranges. Doing
the things mentioned in 2 several times over a whole range just
adds another level of complication.