Create std::stringbuf based on std::vector<char>

Question

I am doing in-memory image conversions between two frameworks (OpenSceneGraph and wxWidgets). Not wanting to care about the underlying classes ( osg::Image and wxImage ), I use the stream oriented I/O features both APIs provide like so:

1) Create an std::stringstream

2) Write to the stream using OSG's writers

3) Read from the stream using wxWigdets readers

This works fairly well. Until now I've been using direct access to the stream buffer, but my attention has been recently caught by the "non-contiguous underlying buffer" problem of the std::stringstream . I had been using a kludge to get a const char* ptr to the buffer - but it worked (tested on Windows, Linux and OSX, using MSVC 9 and GCC 4.x), so I never fixed it.

Now I understand that this code is a time bomb and I want to get rid of it. This problem has been brought up several times on SO ( here for instance ), but I could not find an answer that could really help me do the simplest thing that could possibly work.

I think the most reasonable thing to do is to create my own streambuf using a vector behind the scenes - this would guarantee that the buffer is contiguous. I am aware that this would not a generic solution, but given my constraints:

1) the required size is not infinite and actually quite predictable

2) my stream really needs to be an std::iostream (I can't use a raw char array) because of the APIs

anybody knows how I can either a custom stringbuf using a vector of chars ? Please do not answer "use std::stringstream::str() ", since I know we can, but I'm precisely looking for something else (even though you'd say that copying 2-3 MB is so fast that I wouldn't even notice the difference, let's consider I am still interested in custom stringbufs just for the beauty of the exercise).

Answer 1

If you can use just an istream or an ostream (rather than bidirectional), and don't need seeking, it's pretty simple (about 10 lines of code) to create your own streambuf using std::vector<char> . But unless the strings are very, very large, why bother? The C++11 standard guarantees that std::string is contiguous; that a char* obtained by &myString[0] can be used to as a C style array.` And the reason C++11 added this guarantee was in recognition of existing practice; there simply weren't any implementations where this wasn't the case (and now that it's required, there won't be any implementations in the future where this isn't the case).

Answer 2

boost::iostreams have a few ready made sinks for this. There's array_sink if you have some sort of upper limit and can allocate the chunk upfront, such a sink won't grow dynamically but on the other hand that can be a positive as well. There's also back_inserter_device , which is more generic and works straight up with std::vector for example. An example using back_inserter_device:

#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include "boost/iostreams/stream_buffer.hpp"
#include "boost/iostreams/device/back_inserter.hpp"
int main() 
{
    std::string destination;
    destination.reserve( 1024 ); 
    boost::iostreams::stream_buffer< boost::iostreams::back_insert_device< std::string > > outBuff( ( destination ) );
    std::streambuf* cur = std::cout.rdbuf( &outBuff );
    std::cout << "Hello!" << std::endl;
    // If we used array_sink we'd need to use tellp here to retrieve how much we've actually written, and don't forgot to flush if you don't end with an endl!
    std::cout.rdbuf( cur );
    std::cout << destination;
}