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feature?: ignored characters `'_ / allowing prefixs 0x and 0b etc...

Open Andersama opened this issue 3 years ago • 3 comments

This isn't a performance related feature, but I've found it odd that the charconv spec goes out of its way to avoid parsing what would otherwise be necessary to handle c++'s own floating point literals. What would you think about having some additional utility from_chars like functions to handle those formats?

Ages ago I modified microsoft's charconv to do this for myself, but it broke at some point because headers changed and some utility functions went missing. The core idea is roughly this:

if (fmt is prefixed) {
  //bump pointer forward past the prefix for the format
}

//continue parsing like charconv would except skip over specified characters
uint64_t mantissa = 0;
for (;begin != end; ++begin) {
if ((*begin == some_template_pack) || ...)
  continue;
const unsigned char digit = char_table[*begin];
if (digit >= base)
  break;
//so on...
}

Not used your library, but it seems like hex formatted floats have the enum for the format but aren't supported? Could also be the opportunity to add that in.

Andersama avatar Jan 20 '22 09:01 Andersama

@Andersama We want the from_chars function to abide by the standard as much as possible. It should be close to a "drop-in" replacement for whatever the standard library provides.

However, we also have the from_chars_advanced function which is an extension. There is no limit to what we could do there.

Support for other data types and formats is certainly welcome. Please consider providing a pull request, or many pull requests.

lemire avatar Jan 20 '22 14:01 lemire

It looks like parse_number_string is the underlying function that from_char_advanced is using. Were you expecting the drop in to handle hex floats? Currently it seems like it doesn't, and it seems like I'm about to add a fairly large if / else block otherwise with an extra flag integer to parse_options. Pretty sure that'll be a bit of a performance hit.

Andersama avatar Feb 09 '22 14:02 Andersama

We have decent benchmarks so we can assess performance issues. I would not necessarily be overly concerned at first.

lemire avatar Feb 09 '22 14:02 lemire