> 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.


That's basically it. istream/ostream/iostream simply contains insertion and
extraction methods, but the guts of I/O operations is all in the streambuf
lattice.

It just *looks* cumbersome, but it isn't. The structure is surprisingly elegant.

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