[boost] Serialization question

Hi all, I'm trying to serialize an object to an array of uint8_t which is basically array of bytes. The source code that I have is ... vector<string> names; uint8_t data[60000]; // push_back 10 names ofstream ofs ( "names.txt" ) boost::archive::text_oarchive os ( ofs ); oa & names; ofs.close(); What I want to ask here is how I can avoid to create a file and fill the data array instead by using boost serialization? Any comments will be appreciated. best regards, -- Alexander Dong Back Kim