| There's a right way to do it. It's not the obvious way. Berating people for coming to terms with that isn't helpful. It's not their fault that C++ only really supports std::string out of the box. What are the alternatives? 1. const std::string & : what if I have a vector<char>? 2. const char * : what if it's not null terminated? 3. const char * and size_t : Better, but what if I have a deque<char>? 4. const char * start, const char * stop : Better because you can write algorithms around this, but still, doesn't help with deque<char>? 5. template on START_ITER and STOP_ITER : The best we have now if you need an extremely general solution. But I hope writing your implementation in headers is fine. 6. home grown type : a very popular choice, but http://xkcd.com/927/ 7. boost::string_ref : maybe the best choice, as it can be created from 1-4 (and most 6's), but still doesn't work with deque<char>. ...so give the rookie a break. But I'll support any comment in a code review about not accepting std::string by reference or by value in an interface. |