C++ Cookbook

Introduction

Even if you aren’t writing scientific or engineering applications, you will usually have to work with numbers to some degree. This chapter contains solutions to common problems when working with C++’s numeric types.

Several of the recipes contain techniques for converting numbers of various formats (hexadecimal, floating-point, or scientific notation) from numeric types to strings or vice versa. Writing code to make this transformation yourself is cumbersome and tedious, so I present facilities from the standard library or one of the Boost libraries to make the task easier. There are also a few recipes for dealing with only the numeric types: safely converting between them, comparing floating-point numbers within a bounded range, and finding the minimum and maximum values for numeric types.

The recipes in this chapter provide solutions to some general problems you may run into when working with numbers in C++, but it does not attempt to solve problems that are specific to application domains. If you are writing scientific or engineering applications, you should also take a look at Chapter 11, which contains recipes for many common scientific and numerical algorithms.