There have been many requests on Boost and various C++ newsgroups for unformatted binary I/O. For example, in 2003 Neal Becker wrote: I wonder if anyone has code for implementing unformatted I/O? What I have in mind is for the simple case where the application that reads data knows the data types, so this is not as complicated as the general marshalling situation. This proposal provides a very simple solution that works with standard library input and output streams. The one caveat is that the stream must be opened with filemode std::ios_base::binary to avoid certain data values being treated as line endings. int main() { fstream f("binary_stream_example.dat", std::ios_base::trunc | std::ios_base::in | std::ios_base::out | std::ios_base::binary); int32_t x = 0x01020304; int32_t y = 0; f << bin(x); // write 4 bytes f.seekg(0); f >> bin(y); // read 4 bytes BOOST_ASSERT(x == y); return 0; } For docs, header, and example code, see http://mysite.verizon.net/beman/binary_stream/binary_stream.html http://mysite.verizon.net/beman/binary_stream/binary_stream.hpp http://mysite.verizon.net/beman/binary_stream/binary_stream_example.cpp Is there interest in this for Boost? It seems way too small and simple to be a whole library itself. Are there any ideas where it should live and what namespace it should be in? --Beman