How to Elegantly Iterate Between Consecutive Pairs of Elements and Insert Separators in Modern C ?

Iterating Between Consecutive Pairs of Elements with Modern C Constructs

The task of iterating over a sequence and printing its elements with a separator, but excluding the separator after the last element, is a common programming challenge. While traditional C-style loops or iterators with explicit next() function calls offer solutions, these approaches may not be as elegant or concise for use with modern C features.

One approach that leverages C 11 constructs involves introducing a variable to dynamically track the current iteration state, as follows:

<code class="cpp">const auto separator = "WhatYouWantHere";
const auto* sep = "";
for (const auto& item : items) {
    std::cout << sep << item;
    sep = separator;
}</code>

In this solution, we initialize a constant variable separator to store the desired separator string. We also create a pointer to a constant char, sep, which will initially point to an empty string, effectively suppressing any output before the first element.

Within the range-based loop, we concatenate the current value of sep with the current element and print the result. After this step, we set sep to point to the separator constant, effectively inserting the separator for all subsequent elements.

By employing this approach, we avoid the need for explicit branching or special-casing of the first or last element. The elegant and concise syntax makes it a suitable solution for iterating over sequences and inserting separators between consecutive elements in modern C codebases.

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