C++ stl stringstream direct buffer access

Question

this should be pretty common yet I find it fascinating that I couldn\'t find any straight forward solution.

Basically I read in a file over the network into a string

Answer 1

You can call str() to get back a std::string. From there you can call c_str() on the std::string to get a char*. Note that c_str() isn't officially supported for this use, but everyone uses it this way :)

Edit

This is probably a better solution: std::istream::read. From the example on that page:

  buffer = new char [length];

  // read data as a block:
  is.read (buffer,length);