Re: Cleverly extending the std::string class

Hello,

just wondering if there's a clever way to extend the functionality of
std::string (without using boost).

Newer programming languages like python do have a lot of functionality
associated with strings, which may be handy in C++.

For example lowercasing and uppercasing the string.
Extracting the last element by subscripting -1, or the last say four
chars using [-4:-1] are also desirable.

These functionalities could be accomodated by proper function calls.

If I derive a class from std::string I have all the std::string member
functions return the base class and not the derived class.

So for example I would have to write:

std::string p = "test";
std::string q = ((MYSTRING)p).lower()

while I would prefer to work only with MYSTRING.

MYSTRING p;
MYSTRING q = p.lower();

but then if I call:

q = p.substr(0,4)

substr returns an std::string and not a MYSTRING.

Is this the wrong place where to use inheritance ?

Regards,
Giuliano Bertoletti.