The utilities library is a small collection of C++ classes, functions, and macros that have proven useful across several projects. It is header-only, so there is nothing to compile or link.

All non-macro functionality is in the utilities namespace.

Remarks: You can use any header file in this library on its own — there are no interdependencies.

Available Facilities

Focus	Header File	Brief Description
Assertions	assert.h	Provides several standard assert type macros that improve on the standard one in various ways.
Logging	log.h	Provided some very simple logging macros.
Macros	macros.h	Provides macros commonly used in test programs. It also defines a mechanism to overload a macro based on the number of arguments.
Stopwatch	stopwatch.h	Provides the utilities::stopwatch class, which you can use to time blocks of code.
Streams	stream.h	Provides some functions to read lines from a file, ignoring comments and allowing for continuation lines.
Strings	string.h	Provides several useful string functions (e.g., turning strings to uppercase, trimming white space, etc.).
Formatter	formatter.h	Provides a specialisation of std::formatter for any type that has a to_string() method.
Output	thousands.h	Provides functions to imbue output streams and locales with commas that make it easier to read large numbers.
Types	type.h	Provides the function utilities::type, which returns a string for a type.

Warning: Microsoft's old traditional preprocessor is not happy with some of our macros, but its newer, cross-platform-compatible one is fine. Add the /Zc:preprocessor flag to use that upgrade at compile time. Our CMake module compiler_init does that automatically for you.

Convenience Headers

There are a couple of extra convenience "include-the-lot" headers:

utilities.h: Pulls in all the other header files in the library.
namespace.h: Pulls in all the other header files in the library, and follows that with a using namespace utilities directive.

Installation

This library is header-only, so there is nothing to compile & link. Drop the small utilities header directory into a convenient location. You can even use any single header file on its own.

Alternatively, if you are using CMake, you can use the standard FetchContent module by adding a few lines to your project's CMakeLists.txt file:

include(FetchContent)
FetchContent_Declare(utilities URL https://github.com/nessan/utilities/releases/download/current/utilities.zip)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(utilities)

This command downloads and unpacks the current version of utilities into your project's build folder. You can then add a dependency on utilities::utilities, a CMake alias for utilities. FetchContent will automatically ensure the build system knows where to find the downloaded header files and any needed compiler flags.

Note: That URL downloads the library's current version—whatever is in the main branch when you run the download. That content may change from time to time. Use a URL like https://github.com/nessan/utilities/releases/download/2.0.0/utilities.zip to get a fixed library version.

Links

Here are links to project's repository and documentation site

The project uses Doxytest, a tool for generating C++ test programs from code embedded in header file comments.

You can contact me by email.

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2022-present Nessan Fitzmaurice.
You can use this software under the MIT License