"Drumheller, Michael"
Thank you for the help. I have seen that link (the one you supplied) before, but I posted my question because that link in particular does not mention the words "Boost.Serialization" or "Archive" at all.
That's because the Boost Serialization library is unrelated.
I suppose what I was really getting at, and was probably not very clear about (sorry :| ) was whether the specific approach (by N. Becker) of using a stringstream wrapped with a boost::archive::binary_oarchive is a standard idiom.
"Standard?"
(Basically, I would have thought that "python pickle boost::archive" would be a million-hit Google query, but it's only about a dozen. I find that weird. Do people just not serialize their C++ extensions very often?)
Yes, they do it very often. There's usually no need to touch Boost.Serialization in order to do so, though. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com