Template specialisation where templated type is also a template

Question

I\'ve created a small utility function for string conversion so that I don\'t have to go around creating ostringstream objects all over the place

template<         


        

Answer 1

What about using type traits for serializing different types to the stream like this:

template
struct Traits {
  static inline bool ToStream(std::ostringstream& o, const T& x) {
    return o << x;
  }
};

template
struct Traits > {
  static inline bool ToStream(std::ostringstream& o, const std::pair& x) {
    return o << "[" << x.first << "," << x.second << "]";
  }
};

template
inline std::string ToString(const T& x)
{
  std::ostringstream o;
  if (!Traits::ToStream(o, x))
    return "Error";
  return o.str();
}

Note: "template<>" from the specialization part is optional, the code compiles fine without it. You can further add methods in the traits for the exception message.