Thanks for your interest in Boost.Iostreams. SourceForge.net wrote:

Submitted By: jpstanley (jpstanley)

I maintain software that parses files out of disk images instead of the local file system. I'd like to be able to wrap a C++ istream around my raw binary read/seek APIs to make it easier to parse data from disk images and interface with existing code. Boost.Iostreams makes this job a piece of cake--except that I haven't found a way to make the stream act like an ifstream opened in text mode (I'm on Win32, btw). In other words, I'd like to have CR, LF, and CRLF line endings translated into \n when I read the data. There is a newline_filter class provided which does nearly exactly what I want--but it doesn't support seeking. I still need seekg() and tellg() to work.

I tried writing my own filter, but I ran into some problems. It seems the Boost stream buffer class is built on the assumption that this will hold:

std::streamsize P0 = str.tellg(); str.read(buf, 100); std::streamsize P1 = str.tellg(); assert(P1 - P0 == 100);

Note quite: you could reach EOF before reading 100 characters ;-) But I know what you mean. When you are reading a filtered sequence, there are two file pointers two worry about: there's the current position in the filtered sequence, and the current position in the unfiltered sequence. When you successfully read 100 characters from the filtered sequence, as here: str.read(buf, 100); the current position in the *filtered* sequence is advanced by exactly 100 characters. This may correspond to more than 100 or fewer than 100 characters in the unfiltered sequence.

But with an ifstream opened in text mode, this assertion can fail (P1 - P0 > 100) if two-character CRLF combinations were translated into a one-character newline in the intervening data.

Here you're talking about the current position in the unfiltered sequence. To query this value, you can't use str.tellg(); you have to call seek() on the underlying filter.

Is it possible to implement an input-seekable filter that will let a Boost.Iostream behave this way?

If you want to be able to seek within the filtered sequence, it's possible, but it will be inefficient. If you want to be able to seek with offsets interpretted relative to the unfiltered sequence, I'm not sure it can be done. I'd like you to describe more exactly what you want to do. -- Jonathan Turkanis www.kangaroologic.com