Re: Feeding string into ostringstream only uses up to the first null?

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sat, 31 May 2008 02:32:36 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<1a5579d8-4d21-4b09-8b7f-d28404520e08@d77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>
On May 31, 12:38 am, "Alf P. Steinbach" <al...@start.no> wrote:

* Christopher:

On May 30, 10:18 am, coomberjo...@gmail.com wrote:

On May 30, 4:47 am, James Kanze <james.ka...@gmail.com> wrote:

On May 29, 11:36 pm, coomberjo...@gmail.com wrote:

I have a few std::strings that I am using to store raw binary
data, each of which may very well include null bytes at any
point or points.

As others have pointed out, that's probably a design error.
However...

I guess I don't understand why. Strings are designed to be able to
handle binary data, including nulls.


According to who?


You make an interesting point, in a certain sense[1].


Very much. I've yet to really figure out what std::string was
designed for: it doesn't really have much support for text
(despite its name), and as a more general data container, I
can't imagine a case where std::vector wouldn't be superior.
(I've been playing around with UTF-8 a lot lately, and I've
found that although the interface uses std::string, internally,
std::vector< Byte >, where Byte is a typedef for unsigned char,
works a lot better, most of the time.)

Of course, if you're talking more generally, the word "string"
is usually associated with text, and I wouldn't normally expect
a string to be able to handle binary data (although it should be
able to contain any character data, including that which
contains a '\0' character).

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