kb1vc / sodaformat

A C++ formatting library that provides an "engineering" format for floating point numbers. It is inspired by the Qt "QString" formatting features.

SoDa::Format print stuff.

To get to doxygen generated documentation that is more detailed than the following summary, go here

SoDa::Format is a class that allows intelligent formatting of integer, floating point, string, and character values into std::string objects or for output to a stream. The concept is inspired by the much more capable Qt::QString's formatting features. If you can afford the library dependency, use Qt. It's quite good.

SoDa::Format is meant to improve upon the tremendously awkward, antiquated, and bizarre stream output features of the standard template library. (C++ stream IO was a giant step backward from the comparatively flexible and intuitive FORTRAN "FORMAT" scheme. There isn't much in the computing world that is a giant step backward from FORTRAN circa 1975.)

One could use the BOOST format facility. (One could also eat brussels sprouts for breakfast, but it isn't my kind of thing. Is it yours?) boost::format is tremendously powerful and fabulously documented. It may be easily extended by beings living in some of the outer reaches of the Horse Head nebula. I just don't grok it myself. And carrying around a boost dependency is like growing an extra thumb -- it is useful at times, but it becomes less and less so as time goes on, and you can never quite remember why you got it in the first place.

What really motivated me to write SoDa::Format was the lack of an "engineering notation" format for floating point numbers in any of the common formatting facilities. As a dyed in the wool MKS engineer, this drives me right up the wall. Exponents should be multiples of three. If Adam had done any floating point arithmetic, he would have written it down in engineering notation. (Perhaps he did, and then lost it all when the serpent screwed everything up.)

So with SoDa::Format you can print out

322.0e-6 Farads

instead of the grotesque

3.22e-4 Farads.

Who even thinks like that?

Installing

Just like any other CMake project. For instance, to install the package in /usr/local ... From this directory

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

This will install the libraries in /usr/local/lib or lib64 as appropriate and the include in /usr/local/include/SoDaFormat/Format.hxx

It will also write doxygen output that starts at /usr/local/share/sodaformat/doc/html/index.html

Testing and Using it all

Take a look at the CMakeLists.txt file and FormatExample.cxx in the example directory. If the installation has gone right, then you should be able to do this from this directory.

cd example
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make
./FormatExample

Did that work?