How to access the string representation of boost filesystem's path class, and remove the quotes

Question

I want to save the path to the files in a dir as a string. The example from the tutorial pretty much does what I want except that it does it with the quotation marks which I want to be removed. Now I know that I can do it by adding .string() to the path but I simply don't know where to put it in this example.

Hope someone can help me with that.

Answer 1

As you said you need to use .string() method on path to output without quotation marks. Below the modified tutorial example outputting no quotation marks:

#include <iostream>
#include <iterator>
#include <algorithm>
#include <boost/filesystem.hpp>
using namespace std;
using namespace boost::filesystem;

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    if (argc < 2)
    {
        cout << "Usage: tut3 path\n";
        return 1;
    }

    path p(argv[1]);   // p reads clearer than argv[1] in the following code

    try
    {
        if (exists(p))    // does p actually exist?
        {
            if (is_regular_file(p))        // is p a regular file?
                cout << p.string() << " size is " << file_size(p) << '\n';

            else if (is_directory(p))      // is p a directory?
            {
                cout << p.string() << " is a directory containing:\n";

                for (directory_iterator it(p); it != directory_iterator(); ++it)
                    cout << it->path().string() << "\n";
            }
            else
                cout << p.string() << " exists, but is neither a regular file nor a directory\n";
        }
        else
            cout << p.string() << " does not exist\n";
    }

    catch (const filesystem_error& ex)
    {
        cout << ex.what() << '\n';
    }

    return 0;
}