handling binary streams?

[mburke]

I am building a web server. And some of the data that will be tramsitted back to the browser are images. From what I understand, images have embedded zeros in them.

Can I use the string class to handle it? Or do I need some kind of byte stream? Or a simple char array?

[mwilliamson]

You can use a string (actually only a char array), but you can't treat it as a string. You will have to store the length, and you can't use string functions like strcpy instead use memcpy.

[Paul McKenzie]

You can use std::string to hold binary data, including embedded nulls. The member functions to use to store data in a std::string is std::string::assign().

To return a pointer to the binary data, the member function to use is std::string::data().

Regards,

Paul McKenzie

[souldog]

Would you recommend using std::string for this purpose? I am
having a little trouble getting my head around streams and
memory buffers

[Paul McKenzie]

Originally posted by souldog
Would you recommend using std::string for this purpose? I am
having a little trouble getting my head around streams and
memory buffers I've stored binary data in std::string's (images and binary file data), and have had no problems.

Regards,

Paul McKenzie

[mburke]

Originally posted by Paul McKenzie
You can use std::string to hold binary data, including embedded nulls. The member functions to use to store data in a std::string is std::string::assign().

To return a pointer to the binary data, the member function to use is std::string::data().

Regards,

Paul McKenzie


Great, I was hoping I could use std::string. Thank you

[rfmobile]

You can also use std::vector<char> or std::vector<unsigned char>. It's got most of the same methods as std::string but does not try to append a nul to the end.

-rick