C++ Returning Multiple Items
- by Travis Parks
I am designing a class in C++ that extracts URLs from an HTML page. I am using Boost's Regex library to do the heavy lifting for me. I started designing a class and realized that I didn't want to tie down how the URLs are stored. One option would be to accept a std::vector<Url> by reference and just call push_back on it. I'd like to avoid forcing consumers of my class to use std::vector. So, I created a member template that took a destination iterator. It looks like this:
template <typename TForwardIterator, typename TOutputIterator>
TOutputIterator UrlExtractor::get_urls(
TForwardIterator begin,
TForwardIterator end,
TOutputIterator dest);
I feel like I am overcomplicating things. I like to write fairly generic code in C++, and I struggle to lock down my interfaces. But then I get into these predicaments where I am trying to templatize everything. At this point, someone reading the code doesn't realize that TForwardIterator is iterating over a std::string.
In my particular situation, I am wondering if being this generic is a good thing. At what point do you start making code more explicit? Is there a standard approach to getting values out of a function generically?
