<ye**@twenty.ne t> wrote in message news:EJeYc.5428 4$S55.26683@clg rps12...
Is this even possible? I've found some references to specific "unbuffered "
type methods that exist in older incarnations of basic_streambuf but not in
newer ones.
It's easy to write a stream buffer which performs unbuffered output. Simply
refrain from using the put-area pointer manipulation function setp, etc., and
override overflow (and possibly xsputn) to write directly to the underlying data
sink.
For input, you need a small buffer to support peeking at the next character
without consuming it and putting back a character that has already been
consumed.
Angelika Langer and Kluas Kreft present an unbuffered streambuf implementation
in their text 'Standard C++ Iostreams and Locales', p. 299. Their implementation
uses a buffer of size 1. I believe I found that this implementation does not
work with STLPort, which routinely peeks at the next character internally so
that the putback buffer is always full. So for 'unbuffered' input I always use a
buffer of size at least 2.
I have written an iostreams library which makes it easy to define new streams
and stream buffers. It's up for review for includion in Boost right now. I
encourage anyone who is interested to participate in the review process on the
Boost developers list (see
http://www.boost.org/more/mailing_lists.htm#main).
Jonathan
