Boost FileSystems, need help understanding what I'm doing

Question

I wrote a program using boost filesystems almost a year ago, and I am now trying to go back and use that for a reference, but I'm not sure exactly what is going on with the code, and if there might be a better way to do it.

Here is what I had done to iterate through a directory.

vector <directory_entry> entry;
copy(directory_iterator("path"), directory_iterator(), back_inserter(entry));

This gets me a vector with directory entries for all of the files and directories inside the directory at "path"

Then I would sort them into two vectors of paths, one for files, one for directories, using is_regular_file.

I was working with openAL, and I would have to do this type of conversion to get things working.

path fp = file[0]; //file a vector of directory_entry
string fps = fp.string();
buffer[0] = AlutCreateBufferFromFile(fps.c_str());

And this worked, but I am thinking this all must not be very correct how I'm using it. Anyways, I just wanted to see if anyone could give me a little advice.

Answer 1

Your code looks correct.

You can avoid a couple variable declarations like so:

buffer[0] = AlutCreateBufferFromFile(file[0].string().c_str());

You can also avoid copying the directory entries into a vector and iterate over the directory entries directly:

directory_iterator cur("path");
directory_iterator end;
while (cur != end)
{
    path p = *cur;
    ...  // use p
    ++cur;
}

In C++11, you can improve on the loop further with lambdas:

for_each(directory_iterator("path"), directory_iterator(), [](const path& p)
{
    // use p
});