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By the way, by looking more carefully your interface, I didn't see how to have a reading access to the raw struct of the guid: attribute guid;;_data, more precisely, to the raw data pointer: guid::_data.elems. This reading access could be useful for low level access. Does that make sense?
This does make sense. I have added a constructor to initialize from raw data:
template <ByteInputIterator> guid(ByteInputIterator first, ByteInputIterator last);
and a function to get out the raw bytes:
template <ByteOutputIterator> void output_bytes(ByteOutputIterator out) { std::copy(data_.begin(), data_.end(), out); }
Is output_bytes what you are looking for?
I'm just looking for the raw data pointer of the underlying implementation of boost::array; but your proposal is ok and if I follow you it will be possible to write: boost::guid id ; std::vector<char> bytes ; id.output_bytes(std::back_inserter(bytes)) ; But, in that case, it will not be possible to preallocate the output buffer size because there is no way to get the underlying buffer size (_data). Do you plan to return the buffer size. Thanks in advance. Marc Viala