boost::split leaves empty tokens at the beginning and end of string - is this desired behaviour?

Question

Since I couldn\'t find anything on this in the documentation, I thought I ask it here. I have the following program (C++11):

#include  
#inc         


        

Answer 1

The behavior is intentional, because you could recreate the string (complete with starting and trailing spaces) from the split version. Boost doesn't know if that whitespace is significant or not to you (it might be, as some file formats, for example, might force leading spaces/specific space counts).

You should trim_if or trim as you are if you do need to remove leading/trailing spaces.