Creating custom string classes by inheriting from std::char_traits
The std::string is extremely useful. However, as soon as people need a string class with slightly different semantics for string handling, some tend to write their own string class.
Writing your own string class is rarely a good idea because safe string handling is hard. Fortunately, std::string is only a specializing typedef of the template class, std::basic_string. This class contains all the complicated memory handling stuff, but it does not impose any policy on how strings are copied, compared, and so on. This is something that is imported into basic_string by accepting a template parameter that contains a traits class.
In this recipe, we will see how to build our own trait classes and, this way, how to create custom strings without reimplementing anything.
How to do it...
We are going to implement two different custom string classes: lc_string and ci_string. The first class constructs lower case strings from any string input...
