8.3. string Streams

The sstream header defines three types to support in-memory IO; these types read from or write to a string as if the string were an IO stream.

The istringstream type reads a string, ostringstream writes a string, and stringstream reads and writes the string. Like the fstream types, the types defined in sstream inherit from the types we have used from the iostream header. In addition to the operations they inherit, the types defined in sstream add members to manage the string associated with the stream. These operations are listed in Table 8.5. They may be called on stringstream objects but not on the other IO types.

Table 8.5. stringstream-Specific Operations

Note that although fstream and sstream share the interface to iostream, they have no other interrelationship. In particular, we cannot use open and close on a stringstream, nor can we use str on an fstream.