Welcome to the C++ CTemplate system!

This library provides an easy to use and lightning fast text templating system to use with C++ programs.

It was originally called Google Templates, due to its origin as the template system used for Google search result pages. Now it has a more general name matching its community-owned nature.

Documentation

Refer to the Project Documentation to learn how to use the CTemplate system.

There is also a HOWTO and Examples.

Compiling

To compile test applications with these classes, run cmake followed by make on unixoid platforms like Linux or MacOSX.

To install these header files on your system, run make install.

See INSTALL for more details.

This code should work on any modern C++ system. It has been tested on Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat), Solaris 10 x86, FreeBSD 6.0, OS X 10.3 and 10.4, AIX (XL C/C++), HPuX (with boost headers installed) and Windows under both VC++7 and VC++8.

There are a few Windows-specific details; see README.windows for more information.

Windows-specific details

Currently, Template::StringToTemplate returns a Template object that you, the caller, must free. We've heard reports that Windows can have trouble allocating memory in a .dll that is meant to be freed in the application. Thus, we suggest you not use StringToTemplate from Windows. Instead, you can use Template::StringToTemplateCache() followed by Template::GetTemplate().

CTemplate and Threads

The ctemplate library has thread support, so it works properly in a threaded environment.

For this to work, if you link libraries with -lctemplate you may also need to add -pthread (or, on some systems, -pthreads, and on others, -lpthread) to get the library to compile. If you leave out the -pthread, you'll see errors like this:

symbol lookup error: /usr/local/lib/libctemplate.so.0: undefined symbol: pthread_rwlock_init

If your code isn't multi-threaded, you can instead use the ctemplate_nothread library: -lctemplate_nothreads

To summarize, there are two ways to link in ctemlpate in non-threaded applications. For instance:

1. Thread safe build:gcc -o my_app my_app.o -lctemplate -pthread

2. Unthreaded code:gcc -o my_app my_app.o -lctemplate_nothreads

If your application uses threads, you should use form (1).