Question

Does anyone know a good safe way to redirect the output of a printf-style function to a string? The obvious ways result in buffer overflows.

Something like:

string s; output.beginRedirect( s );  // redirect output to s  ... output.print( '%s%d', foo, bar );  output.endRedirect(); 

I think the problem is the same as asking, ‘how many characters will print produce?’ Ideas?

Answer 1

This StackOverflow question has a similar discussion. Also in that question I present my favorite solution, a ‘format’ function that takes identical arguments to printf and returns a std::string.