How to tell stringstream to ignore null terminating character?

Question

Is there any way to tell a stringstream to ignore a null terminating char and read a certain amount of chars anyway?

As you can see from this minimum example, even though the char array consists of 3 chars, the stringstream terminates at the second position:

#include <sstream>
#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
        char test[3];
        test[0] = '1';
        test[1] = '\0';
        test[2] = '2';

        stringstream ss(test);

        char c;
        cout << "start" << endl;
        while (ss.get(c)) {
                cout << c << endl;
        }

        if (ss.eof()) {
                cout << "eof" << endl;
        }
}

$ ./a.out 
start
1
eof

Answer 1

This question is not about stringstreams. The problem is you are implicitly constructing a std::string from a const char* for that stringstream constructor argument, and doing so using the overload that expects a C-string. So, naturally, you should expect C-string-like behaviour.

Instead you can form the argument using the std::string(const char*, std::size_t) constructor, or send the data to a default-constructed stringstream using .write .

Answer 2

In addition to the other answer explaining the underlying problem (creating a std::string from a char* ), here's one (of many) ways around the problem, using std::string_literals :

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <sstream>

int main(){
  using namespace std::string_literals;
  const std::string str_with_null = "1\0002"s;
  std::stringstream ss(str_with_null);
  char c;
  while (ss.get(c)) {
    std::cout << static_cast<int>(c) << '\n';
  }
}

When run, this should print out:

49
0
50