Qt Transition – Strings (Begin)

The last class to replace is the String class.  The Qt equivalent class is QString and related QByteArray.  As with the List class, the transition will be done in steps.  The Token class would be first.  The first primary user of the Token class is the Parser class, which is also very dense with string operations.  The QString class has many useful functions, and these should help simplify the Parser functions.

Before tackling the Parser, the test code will need to be able to handle the change from String to QString.  The are two other major items in the test code that also needed to be transitioned to Qt, namely file handling, console input and console output.

The Qt QFile class handles file handling and is much simpler to use then the c file handling that was being used.  The QFile class can also handle reading input from the console.  There is also the QFileInfo class that contains many useful functions, but the ones used here were for parsing file names (including the program name).  There are single functions for extracting the path, file name, base file name without extension.

The QTextStream class handles output and is very similar to C++ stream output.  In the main source file, the standard output is opened as a QFile and is attached to a QTextStream named cout.  This text stream is then passed to all the functions that need to do output.

As described in the previous post, the opportunity was taken to rename many of the variables and functions to the Qt naming convention.  Now that the callers to the Parser (and Translator) have been transitioned to Qt, it's time to work on the Parser (and Token) classes.

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