Convert a number to a string with specified length in C++

Question

I have some numbers of different length (like 1, 999, 76492, so on) and I want to convert them all to strings with a common length (for example, if the length is 6, then tho

Answer 1

One thing that you may want to be aware of is the potential locking that may go on when you use the stringstream approach. In the STL that ships with Visual Studio 2008, at least, there are many locks taken out and released as various locale information is used during formatting. This may, or may not, be an issue for you depending on how many threads you have that might be concurrently converting numbers to strings...

The sprintf version doesn't take any locks (at least according to the lock monitoring tool that I'm developing at the moment...) and so might be 'better' for use in concurrent situations.

I only noticed this because my tool recently spat out the 'locale' locks as being amongst the most contended for locks in my server system; it came as a bit of a surprise and may cause me to revise the approach that I've been taking (i.e. move back towards sprintf from stringstream)...