Darren Garvey wrote:

Hi,

I was wondering about tcp::iostreams. I need to have the ability to write code like: obj<< "Hello world" and at intervals (of size) have a header attached and then have it written to an open socket.

I have been looking into Boost.Iostreams to do this, but I was wondering if rather than implementing the whole streambuf/sink, I could just create a filtering_streambuf (naming convention taken from Boost.Iostreams ) - which would attach the header when needed - and just instantiate a tcp::iostream object with that streambuf.

I'm still very foggy on the Iostreams library - and streams/buffers in general - but does that sound like it could work?

This comment is about [iostreams] not [asio] as your message header indicates. I haven't used it (IoStreams) for tcp streams but I have for encryption. I wrote a Multi Character Dual Use filter (it reads and writes). If you only need to write, you could build a Multi Character Output Filter. You need to write your Filter class and implement a Write function of the form template<typename Sink> std::streamsize write(Sink& dest, const char* s, std::streamsize n) { ... } To handle the header stuff. Just keep a state member variable in your class and count how many characters you write... then add your header when necessary and reset the count. I think you may need to to some flushing too? Check out the Multi-character filter section of the Tutorial in: http://boost.org/libs/iostreams/doc/index.html It has some good example code