I think there are some other considerations here with date-time. What if you want to replace the short or long strings associated with a month output? Or I want the 'days of the week' be 'day1', 'day2', instead of 'Sun', 'Mon', etc. For these cases I think the strings need to get associated with a facet instead of a fleeting i/o manipulator. So for example
//let's change all the short month names to have stars around them const char* const month_short_names[]={"*jan*","*feb*","*mar*", "*apr*","*may*","*jun*", "*jul*","*aug*","*sep*", "*oct*","*nov*","*dec*"};
All good points, I must admit I clean forgot about Day/Month names. I quite like Howard's idea of a manipulator that tweaks the facets directly, it's really just that I find manipulators a whole lot easier to use. John.