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Front Page / Algorithms / Concepts / Inserter

Inserter

Description

An Inserter is a compile-time substitute for STL Output Iterator. Under the hood, it's simply a type holding two entities: a state and an operation. When passed to a transformation algorithm, the inserter's binary operation is invoked for every element that would normally be written into the output iterator, with the element itself (as the second argument) and the result of the previous operation's invocation — or, for the very first element, the inserter's initial state.

Technically, instead of taking a single inserter parameter, transformation algorithms could accept the state and the "output" operation separately. Grouping these in a single parameter entity, however, brings the algorithms semantically and syntactically closer to their STL counterparts, significantly simplifying many of the common use cases.

Valid expressions

In the following table and subsequent specifications, in is a model of Inserter.

Expression Type
in::state Any type
in::operation Binary Lambda Expression

Expression semantics

Expression Semantics
in::state The inserter's initial state.
in::operation The inserter's "output" operation.

Example

typedef transform<
      range_c<int,0,10>
    , plus<_1,_1>
    , back_inserter< vector0<> >
    >::type result;

Models

See also

Algorithms, Transformation Algorithms, inserter (class), front_inserter, back_inserter