Hi, Recently, I observed in an online community a question on whether C++ had a direct replacement for a call to scanf("a=%d", a) for some int a, using std::cin. The response given was to read the input as a string and then parse it. Another user noted that "iostreams would be more useful if it had the ability to match constant portions of the input". Looking at what already exists in the standard library and Boost, there does indeed seem to be no direct way to match such expected constant input. Boost.Regex and Boost.Tokenizer are indirect in this case (and possibly overkill), and Boost.Format is about output stream formatting only. Boost.Spirit appears to provide a way with file_iterator, but a manipulator seems more appropriate here considering that the functionality is quite simple. Does anyone think that adding such a manipulator to Boost would be desirable? I expect the syntax to be along these lines (names and namespaces to be decided): std::cin >> match("a=") >> a; where a failure to match would place the input stream in a failed state. It would also be possible to use a std::basic_string instead of a string literal converted to a pointer to its first element as the argument. I have already written such a manipulator, so if anyone is interested, I can provide my sample source. Regards, Eugene Wee