stringstream clearing question

[Moooce]

Since I'm one of those dodgy programmers who uses C + classes, I loiter here in an attempt to be fully converted to C++, you’ll be glad to hear it’s working, all be it a little slowly 8-)

Working with stringstreams I've found to be nice in the way of adding all sorts of types to a string ready to print or output to a file, however when say, assembling separate lines of text to be displayed, it would be nice to clear the stream last displayed and start adding to a new line of text (reusing the stream from empty) but there appears to be no member function to do this? Am I misusing stringstreams (ie there's something better for what I'm doing) or is it really the case of using the rather hackish method?

s.str("");

Your advice as always appreciated.

[Mekolle]

s.clear(); ?

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostream/ios/clear/

[Moooce]

well that's what I would have thought, but that clears error states, not the contents of the stream.

[Athar]

Usually simple string concatenation and to_string/lexical_cast-like functions are far more convenient than stringstreams, especially for simple cases, e.g.:
setText("Status: "+to_string(status));

And no, there's no easier way to reset a stringstream.

[Moooce]

Thanks Athar, really wanted to check I wasn't breaking anything with the str("") bit. So it's ok to do, just seems a bit odd.

I guess with the to_string function you mean write a function to take a value and return a string as the only to_string function I can find is for bit_set? Anyway, it's probably a good excercise for writing a template function taking different types?

[Peter87]

std::to_string is in C++11. If your implementation doesn't have it yet you can do as you said. Writing the function with templates using stringstream inside is not very hard.

[Athar]

Also, lexical_cast is a function template in boost that allows you to convert to and from strings:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_49_0/doc/html/boost_lexical_cast.html

[Moooce]

Yep, I agree, ended up with this which works fine for my needs, thanks all.

template <class myType>
inline std::string to_string( myType v )
{
    std::ostringstream oss;
    oss << v ;
    return oss.str() ;
}

main(...)
{
	std::string txt;
	int vali = 65;
	float valf = 66.43;
	txt = "int value is ";
	txt += to_string( vali );
	txt += " float value is ";
	txt += to_string( valf );

}