silly array element counter..

Ok.. first of all I am a bit new to STL, however I am having this problem in C++.

I have got a function defined as

int MyClass::MyString(string str[])
{
//code

}

Is there any way to find out how many elements of array are being passed to the function.
I have no way to know how many functions are being passed but only know that the constratints would be say 1 to 100 as I don't have the code that calls the function and am only supposed to write this single class.

doing (sizeof(str)/sizeof(str[0])) returns "1" and is of no use..

is there some way to find count the elements of this string array..

No, there is no way. But you can use a std::vector instead of an array. This way you'll be able to retrieve the number of object it contains.

Stroustrup recommends not using arrays. Many coding standards insist on never using arrays.

See "What's wrong with arrays?" at
http://public.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html

Unless your array is NULL terminated, you have no way of finding out. This is why you often see array length as argument to array functions. ;)

It may be nice to not impose a particular type of container (like std::vector) on the callers of the int MyClass::MyString method. Sometimes, I like to make these types of methods templatized on an iterator type like this:

Code:

---

template< class IteratorType >
int MyClass::MyString(const IteratorType &iterBegin, const IteratorType &iterEnd)
{
    // Get a count of items passed in.
    const size_t  nNumItems = iterEnd-iterBegin;
 
    // Iterate over the input
    IteratorType iter;
    for(iter = iterBegin; iter != iterEnd; ++iter)
    {
      // Do something here.
    }
}

---