How to reuse an ostringstream?

Question

I've used a sequence of clear and str in the past:

// clear, because eof or other bits may be still set. 
s.clear();
s.str("");

Which has done the thing for both input and output stringstreams. Alternatively, you can manually clear, then seek the appropriate sequence to the begin:

s.clear();
s.seekp(0); // for outputs: seek put ptr to start
s.seekg(0); // for inputs: seek get ptr to start

That will prevent some reallocations done by str by overwriting whatever is in the output buffer currently instead. Results are like this:

std::ostringstream s;
s << "hello";
s.seekp(0);
s << "b";
assert(s.str() == "bello");

If you want to use the string for c-functions, you can use std::ends, putting a terminating null like this:

std::ostringstream s;
s << "hello";
s.seekp(0);
s << "b" << std::ends;
assert(s.str().size() == 5 && std::strlen(s.str().data()) == 1);

std::ends is a relict of the deprecated std::strstream, which was able to write directly to a char array you allocated on the stack. You had to insert a terminating null manually. However, std::ends is not deprecated, i think because it's still useful as in the above cases.

Seems to be that the ostr.str("") call does the trick.

If you're going to clear the buffer in a way that will cause it to be cleared before it's first use, you'll need to add something to the buffer first w/ MSVC.

struct Foo {
    std::ostringstream d_str;
    Foo() { 
        d_str << std::ends;   // Add this
    }
    void StrFunc(const char *);
    template<class T>
    inline void StrIt(const T &value) {
        d_str.clear();
        d_str.seekp(0);  // Or else you'll get an error with this seek
        d_str << value << std::ends;
        StrFunc(d_str.str().c_str());  // And your string will be empty
    }
};