A dynamic buffer type in C++?

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I'm not exactly a C++ newbie, but I have had little serious dealings with it in the past, so my knowledge of its facilities is rather sketchy.

I'm writing a quick proof-of-concept program in C++ and I need a dynamically sizeable buffer of binary data. That is, I'm going to receive data from a network socket and I don't know how much there will be (although not more than a few MB). I could write such a buffer myself, but why bother if the standard library probably has something already? I'm using VS2008, so some Microsoft-specific extension is just fine by me. I only need four operations:

  • Create the buffer
  • Write data to the buffer (binary junk, not zero-terminated)
  • Get the written data as a char array (together with its length)
  • Free the buffer

What is the name of the class/function set/whatever that I need?

Added: Several votes go to std::vector. All nice and fine, but I don't want to push several MB of data byte-by-byte. The socket will give data to me in few-KB large chunks, so I'd like to write them all at once. Also, at the end I will need to get the data as a simple char*, because I will need to pass the whole blob along to some Win32 API functions unmodified.

dynamic buffer memory-management stl c++
10 Answers

The point here is, what you want to use the buffer for. If you want to keep structures with pointers the buffer has to be kept fix at the memory address allocated first. To circumvent this, you have to use relative pointers and a fixup list for updating the pointers after the final allocation. This would be worth a class of its own. (Didn't find such a thing).

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