Question

I have a situation where I read data from a struct and keep appending it to a string so that it can be sent over a socket. When the data is fairly large, this operation is taking a lot of time. Can someone suggest any alternatives?

I have a structure

struct fileInfo
{
int file_id;
char filename[16];
double tag;
}

I do a std::stringstream >>file_id and stringstream.str()
this is repeated for each value, appended to a string and sent

Answer 1

std::ostringstream from <sstream> is designed for exactly that mode of operation.

ostringstream my_text;
my_text << "hello " << 2 << foo << endl; // efficiently catenate

socket.send( my_text.str() ); // get a std::string to handle data