How many character can a STL string class can hold?

Question

I need to work with a series of characters. The number of characters can be upto 10¹¹. In a usual array, it's not possible. What should I use? I wanted to use gets() function to hold the string. But, is this possible for STL containers? If not, then what's the way?

Example: input: AMIRAHID output: A.M.I.R.A.H.I.D

How to make this possible if the number of characters lessened to 10^10 in 32-bit machine ?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Well, that's roughly 100GByte of data. No usual string class will be able to hold more than fits into your main memory. You might want to look at STXXL, which is an implementation of STL allowing to store part of the data on disk.