C++17 STL Cookbook

Comfortably pretty printing numbers differently per context on the fly

In the last recipe, we learned how to format the output with output streams. And while doing the same, we realized two facts:

• Most I/O manipulators are sticky, so we have to revert their effect after use in order to not tamper with other unrelated code, which also prints
• It can be very tedious and does not look very readable if we have to set up long chains of I/O manipulators in order to get only a few variables printed with specific formatting

A lot of people do not like I/O streams for such reasons, and even in C++, they still use printf for formatting their strings.

In this recipe, we will see how to format types on the fly without too much I/O manipulator noise ...