G'day David,

Replying to a message of David Nugent to Greg Newton:

 >> I've got to admit this bit went by me (this time... hopefully
 >> the light bulb will come on soon).

 DN> What I'm saying is that an ostream_withassign is a neat, multipurpose
 DN> generic ostream which can use any sort of streambuf that you throw at
 DN> it. It has all of the characteristics of an ostream, except that -
 DN> unlike an ostream - it isn't an abstract base class, so you can
 DN> actually create an instance of one. Just assign any sort of streambuf
 DN> you might derive and you don't have to touch that side of the class
 DN> hierachy, only the streambuf or whatever type of streambuf you happen
 DN> to be working on.

 DN> streambuf provides you byte-level access to the stream, direct access
 DN> to the buffers themselves - everything you want. Don't worry about
 DN> fiddling with ostreams, since that's the wrong place to do what you
 DN> want to do.

I think I get it a bit better this time.

I derive a class from streambuf to do any modifications on the stream, then
use ostream_withassign to get to use all the standard output methods on my
mangled stream.


Cheers,
Greg |;^)

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