Question

I have a boost::filesystem::path instance x. I would like to determine whether x contains any path delimiters in it.

Now, I can simply look for \\ and / in x.string(), but I am interested in the boost way to do it, meaning utilizing the boost::filesystem library, if possible.

Thanks.

EDIT

1. Let me narrow the problem space. My tool is never going to be run on anything, but the Windows OS.
2. I have forgotten the drive specifications (c:, etc…). I do not want them either.

Answer 1

You can’t.

But do you really want to? For example c:a contains two path elements c: and a on windows. Why do you need to search for a path delimiter? What makes you think that such a thing exists on all platforms? What is a path delimiter in OpenVMS? E.g. in:

[a.b.c]a.txt;12

Morale: paths are more complicated beasts than people are used to think. And in fact boost::filesystem::path doesn’t work well anywhere beyond POSIX paths. But this is another story.

EDIT: assuming that your question is how to check if a path consists of a single element then the answer is, well, count the number of elements:

boost::filesystem::path p = ...;
if(std::distance(p.begin(), p.end()) == 1)
    cout << "one element\n";