Chapter 14. Boost.Array

The library Boost.Array defines the class template boost::array in boost/array.hpp. boost::array is similar to std::array, which was added to the standard library with C++11. You can ignore boost::array if you work with a C++11 development environment.

With boost::array, an array can be created that exhibits the same properties as a C array. In addition, boost::array conforms to the requirements of C++ containers, which makes handling such an array as easy as handling any other container. In principle, one can think of boost::array as the container std::vector, except the number of elements in boost::array is constant.

#include <boost/array.hpp>
#include <string>
#include <algorithm>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
  typedef boost::array<std::string, 3> array;
  array a;

  a[0] = "cat";
  a.at(1) = "shark";
  *a.rbegin() = "spider";

  std::sort(a.begin(), a.end());

  for (const std::string &s : a)
    std::cout << s << '\n';

  std::cout << a.size() << '\n';
  std::cout << a.max_size() << '\n';
}

As seen in Example 14.1, using boost::array is fairly simple and needs no additional explanation since the member functions called have the same meaning as their counterparts from std::vector.