The Standard C++ I/O Classes

The Standard C++ I/O system is constructed from a rather complex system of template classes. These classes are shown here:

Also part of the I/O class hierarchy is the nontemplate class ios_base. It provides definitions for various elements of the I/O system.

The C++ I/O system is built upon two related, but different, template class hierarchies. The first is derived from the low-level I/O class called basic_streambuf. This class supplies the basic, low-level input and output operations, and provides the underlying support for the entire C++ I/O system. The classes basic_filebuf and basic_stringbuf are derived from basic_streambuf. Unless you are doing advanced I/O programming, you will not need to use basic_streambuf or its subclasses directly.

The class hierarchy that you will most commonly be working with is derived from basic_ios. This is a high-level I/O class that provides formatting, error checking, and status information related to stream I/O. basic_ios is used as a base for several derived classes, including basic_istream, basic_ostream, and basic_iostream. These classes are used to create streams capable of input, output, and input/output, respectively. Specifically, from basic_istream are derived the classes basic_ifstream and basic_istringstream, from basic_ostream are derived basic_ofstream and basic_ostringstream, and from basic_iostream are derived basic_fstream and basic_stringstream. A base class for basic_ios is ios_base. Thus, any class derived from basic_ios has access to the members of ios_base.

The I/O classes are parameterized for the type of characters that they act upon and for the traits associated with those characters. For example, here is the template specification for basic_ios:

template <class CharType, class Attr = char_traits<CharType> >
   class basic_ios: public ios_base

Here, CharType specifies the type of character (such as char or wchar_t) and Attr specifies a type that describes its attributes. The generic type char_traits is a utility class that defines the attributes associated with a character.

The I/O library creates two specializations of the template class hierarchies just described: one for 8-bit characters and one for wide characters. Here is a complete list of the mapping of template class names to their character and wide-character versions:

Since the vast majority of programmers will be using character-based I/O, those are the names used by this chapter. Thus, when referring to the I/O classes, we will simply use their character-based names rather then their internal, template names. For instance, this chapter will use the name ios rather than basic_ios, istream rather than basic_istream, and fstream rather than basic_fstream. Remember, parallel classes exist for wide-character streams and they work in the same way as those described here.