Introduction

This chapter is devoted to string handling, parsing, and printing of arbitrary data. For such jobs, STL provides its I/O stream library. The library basically consists of the following classes, which are each depicted in gray boxes:

The arrows show the inheritance scheme of the classes. This might look very overwhelming at first, but we will get to use most of these classes in this chapter and get familiar with them class by class. When looking at those classes in the C++ STL documentation, we will not find them directly with these exact names. That is because the names in the diagram are what we see as application programmers, but they are really mostly just typedefs of classes with a basic_ class name prefix (for example, we will have an easier job searching the STL documentation for basic_istream rather than istream). The basic_* I/O stream classes are templates that can be specialized for different character types. The classes in the diagram are specialized on char values...