Binary stream or something like this to save class like std::vector to a file?

I'm not good in IOstream library since I have accustom to stdio and stuff life this, however I got a problem I hoped to be solved in IOstream but I find that it probably not. So I'm quite new to standard C++ libraries but quite well with C++ OOP/Classes and so on.

So I can't use code like

printf (stream, "...", C);

if C is of an aggregate type because I can't create new format string options like %mytupe. Also I can't expect proper behavior of

fwrite/fread (&C, sizeof(C), 1, stream)

if T contains fields that are pointers because fwrite/fread will save/load value of a pointer but not a value stored in memory where the pointer refers to:

class MyClass
   {...
    private:
       {typename} Tp* Data;
   } C;

I don't care much of first limit because I can write a function that convert object of each of my class to a text string, it works even if but the last can't be solved easily. For example, I tried to create a function that save each class to binary file but I got a lot of problems with staff like luck of partial specialization of a template and so on (mo matter).

Being tired of making bugs and mistakes while rewriting standard code (like own string and file holder classes) I hoped that learning (at last!) of standard (written by clever people and well-tested :) library will help me since I read a lot that standard C++ library solve first issue with using of streams. I can overload operator << and operator >> or so on to be sure that my class will be saved to or read from text file properly. But what about binary files which is much much more important for me?

What should I do if I want to save an object of class like vector, for example, to the binary file? Using of <<开发者_开发百科; and >> fails at all since it says that vector has no operators << and >> overloaded, but even if it had it would produce text data.

Staff like

vector <MyClass> V;
...
ofstream file ("file.bin", ios::binary);

int size1 = ;
file.write((const char*)&V.size(), sizeof(V.size()));
file.write((const char*)&V[0], V.size() * sizeof(MyClass));

is not suitable (and doesn't differs much from using of fwrite) since it saves value (address) of pointer field but not the data stored there (also, what if I declare a "two-dimension" vector as vector > ??). So, if there was overloading of vector operator << like

template <class T> vector
  {public:
   ...    
     ostream operator << () const
        {ostream s;
         for (uint32_t k = 0; k < size(); k++)
            s << s << this->operator[] (k);
         return s;
        }
   private:
      T* Data;
  };

and if each T::operator << was overloaded too in the same way (for MyClass - to provide stream of data stored in MyCLass::Tp) it was saved.

(I know, I know, there should be iterator, but maybe I made a more serious mistake because of total misunderstanding of streams? Anyway just I'm talking about idea.)

Well, it is a way to convert data to text, not to got binary data as it is stored in memory, but I know there can be written an interface to work with binary data in the same way (maybe not using << and >> but function names, but it can be for sure)! The questing is: was it done in standard C++ library or somewhere else (another opensource library for C++)? Yes, yes, to properly write a vector to file in one line. (I'll be very surprised if it is not included into standard C++ because how do people save data they work to files if they want to use multidimension dynamic arrays?)

---

You're looking for the term "serialization", and you might want to use the Boost::Serialization library for that purpose.