With Range v3 ranges, how to combine views and actions into a single pipeline?

Yes you can. You need to use a conversion to materialise the view into an actual container to perform actions on it. I found a new piece of code in the range-v3 master branch introducing range::v3::to<Container> to perform such conversions.

git blame suggests that Eric started working on it this year (2019) and it is not really documented yet. However, I find range-v3/test pretty good learning material on how the library is used :)

I doubt that it is available in the VS2015 branch. However, Visual 2017 is already able to take the master branch of the library.

#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <cctype>
#include <range/v3/view/filter.hpp>
#include <range/v3/view/transform.hpp>
#include <range/v3/action/sort.hpp>
#include <range/v3/action/unique.hpp>
#include <range/v3/range/conversion.hpp>

int main() {
    using namespace ranges::v3;
    std::string input = " 1a2a3Z4b5Z6cz ";
    std::string result = input
                       | view::filter(::isalpha)
                       | view::transform(::tolower)
                       | to<std::string>
                       | action::sort
                       | action::unique;
    std::cout << result << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

Outputs:

abcz

which I believe is what you expect

ranges::to is what you want.

Rolling your own semi-replacement is easy.

template<class C, class R>
C to_container( R&& r ) {
  using std::begin; using std::end;
  return C( begin(std::forward<R>(r)), end(std::forward<R>(r)) );
}

Not library-strength (lacks early failure as the biggest problem, and does not support |) but quite usable.

and then we just:

std::string r = to_container<std::string>( input | view::remove_if(not_alpha) | view::transform(::tolower) ) | action::sort |  action::unique;

Note that taking addresses of functions in std is no longer advised (via @DavisHerring in a comment above)

To upgrade to |:

template<class C>
struct to_container_t {
  template<class R>
  C operator()( R&& r )const {
    using std::begin; using std::end;
    return C( begin(std::forward<R>(r)), end(std::forward<R>(r)) );
  }
  template<class R>
  friend C operator|( R&& r, to_container_t self ){
    return self( std::forward<R>(r) );
  }
};
template<class C>
constexpr to_container_t<C> to_container{};

Which gives us:

std::string r = input | view::remove_if(not_alpha) | view::transform(::tolower) | to_container<std::string> | action::sort |  action::unique;

As required.