For what its worth, I always envisioned alternative top level IO classes using streambuf's as the underlying transport. The central class of the iostream library is really streambuf and I've long regretted not calling the library "streambuf". I always encourage people to use streambuf's directly when all they want to do is transport bytes. So I like the idea of this library. It is more consistent with my ideas of how "iostream" should be used than is using istream or ostream directly to read and write binary files. But I would prefer it if binary_istream, binary_ostream and binary_iostream had a constructor that took a streambuf argument and that (at least optionall) ownership would be transfered to the streambuf. That is the stream would be responsible for freeing it. This would work best if these classes were templatized on the streambuf type so the if I had a binary_istream<filebuf> say rdbuf would return a filebuf. (Templates were not available when iostream was designed). I realize that people like the connivence of classes like binary_ifstream, but I don't think it's that much worse to write something like binary_istream<filebuf> f( new filebuf(path)); or, if you prefer not to use the new expression directly supply functions to build the filebuf. binary_istream<filebuf> f(mkFilebuf(path)); I note that as the code stands if I do binary_ifstream f(path); binary_istream& i = f; i.rdbuf(b); then f.rdbuf() and i.rdbuf() will return different streambuf's. It was to avoid that anomaly that the original (pre standard) iostream did not have any way to change the streambuf of a stream after the stream had been constructed. On May 26, 2007, at 7:32 PM, Shams wrote:
Hi,
I have had a look at the example...
Questions: 1. Apart from handling endianess what is really different from iostreams opened in binary mode? 2. Is/can the endianness BOM (byte order mark) written to the file automatically?
Thanks Shams
--
"Ares Lagae" <ares.lagae@cs.kuleuven.be> wrote in message news:f31613$i4g$1@sea.gmane.org...
I have developed a small library for binary I/O, called binary_iostreams, and I am using it in several of my own projects. I was wondering if there is interest for such a binary_iostreams library?
The binary_iostreams is a small library, very similar to the iostreams library. Compared to iostreams, the unformatted I/O operators remain, and the formatted I/O operators now do binary I/O. This makes the binary_iostreams library easy to use for anyone acquainted with the iostreams library. The binary_iostreams library allows to set the endianness of the output stream. Together with <cstdint>, this allows for portable binary I/O, although binary_iostreams does not claim to be a full blown serialization library.
Direct link to a motivating example: http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~ares/binary_iostreams/test.cpp
The library: http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~ares/binary_iostreams/ binary_iostreams-0.1.tar.gz
The documentation: http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~ares/binary_iostreams/doc/html
Best regards,
-- Ares Lagae Computer Graphics Research Group, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~ares/
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