What does ifstream::rdbuf() actually do?

Question

I have the following code and it works pretty good (other than the fact that it\'s pretty slow, but I don\'t care much about that). It doesn\'t seem intuitive that this woul

Answer 1

Yes, it's specified in the standard and it's actually quite simple. rdbuf() just returns a pointer to the underlying basic_streambuf object for the given [io]stream object.

basic_ostream<...> has an overload for operator<< for a pointer to basic_streambuf<...> which writes out the contents of the basic_streambuf<...>.