Why doesn't std::istream_iterator< std::string_view > compile?

July 1, 2022

Why can’t GCC and Clang compile the code snippet below (link)? I want to return a vector of std::string_views but apparently there is no way of extracting string_views from the stringstream.

#include <iostream>
#include <sstream>
#include <string>
#include <string_view>
#include <vector>
#include <iterator>
#include <algorithm>
#include <ranges>


[[ nodiscard ]] std::vector< std::string_view >
tokenize( const std::string_view inputStr, const size_t expectedTokenCount )
{
    std::vector< std::string_view > foundTokens { };

    if ( inputStr.empty( ) ) [[ unlikely ]]
    {
        return foundTokens;
    }

    std::stringstream ss;
    ss << inputStr;

    foundTokens.reserve( expectedTokenCount );

    std::copy( std::istream_iterator< std::string_view >{ ss }, // does not compile
               std::istream_iterator< std::string_view >{ },
               std::back_inserter( foundTokens ) );

    return foundTokens;
}

int main( )
{
    using std::string_view_literals::operator""sv;
    constexpr auto text { "Today is a nice day."sv };

    const auto tokens { tokenize( text, 4 ) };

    std::cout << tokens.size( ) << '\n';
    std::ranges::copy( tokens, std::ostream_iterator< std::string_view >{ std::cout, "\n" } );
}

Note that replacing select instances of string_view with string lets the code compile.

>Solution :

Because there is no operator >> on std::stringstream and std::string_view (and std::istream_iterator requires this operator).

As @tkausl points out in the comments, it’s not possible for >> to work on std::string_view because it’s not clear who would own the memory pointed to by the std::string_view.

In the case of your program, ss << inputStr copies the characters from inputStr into ss, and when ss goes out of scope its memory would be freed.