13.13. The Stream Buffer Classes

As mentioned in Section 13.2.1, the actual reading and writing is not done by the streams directly, but is delegated to stream buffers. This section describes how these classes operate. The discussion not only gives a deeper understanding of what is going on when I/O streams are used, but also provides the basis to define new I/O channels. Before going into the details of stream buffer operation, the public interface is presented for those only interested in using stream buffers.

13.13.1. User's View of Stream Buffers

To the user of a stream buffer the class basic_streambuf is not much more than something that characters can be sent to or extracted from. Table 13.41 lists the public function for writing characters.