Custom stream manipulators

Question

I have a custom stream CFileManagerOStream that inherits from std::ostream, it takes Unicode UTF16 or UTF32 strings from a network stream class CTcpStream and stores them on disk as UTF8 strings. The strings are potentially way too large (could be multiple terrabytes) to be converted to UTF8 in-memory so I think I need to implement a C++ stream manipulator for this job. All the manipulator examples I have found take the entire string and processes it, which will not do in my case because of the low memory requirements. I have all the Unicode conversion code ready, the problem I'm trying to solve is doing the conversion with as little internal memory as possible.

I was hoping to use the manipulators like this;

CFileManagerOStream outFile("MultipleUtf8Strings.dat"); // Custom std::ostream
...
#ifdef _WINDOWS
CTcpStreamUtf16 largeBlobUtf16Stream;
...
outFile << ToUTF8FromUtf16 << largeBlobUtf16Stream;
#else
CTcpStreamUtf32 largeBlobUtf32Stream;
...
outFile << ToUTF8FromUtf32 << largeBlobUtf32Stream;
#endif

Is this possible or am I approaching this wrongly?

Answer 1

I found out that using std::ios_base::iword to store the requested character encoding was the best solution for the problem at hand:

#include <iostream>

/*!
\brief Unicode encoding
*/
enum EUnicodeEnc
{
    /** UTF-8 character encoding */
    EUnicodeEnc_UTF8 = 1,

    /** UTF-16 character encoding */
    EUnicodeEnc_UTF16 = 2,

    /** UTF-32 character encoding */
    EUnicodeEnc_UTF32 = 3
};

/** Allocate the \c std::ios_base::iword storage for use with \c SourceStreamEncoding object instances */
int SourceStreamEncoding::sourceEnc_xalloc = std::ios_base::xalloc();

/*!
\brief Stream I/O manipulator changes the source character encoding to UTF-8
*/
std::ios_base& FromUtf8(std::ios_base& os) {
    os.iword(SourceStreamEncoding::sourceEnc_xalloc) = EUnicodeEnc_UTF8;
    return os;
}

/*!
\brief Stream I/O manipulator changes the source character encoding to UTF-16
*/
std::ios_base& FromUtf16(std::ios_base& os) {
    os.iword(SourceStreamEncoding::sourceEnc_xalloc) = EUnicodeEnc_UTF16;
    return os;
}

/*!
\brief Stream I/O manipulator changes the source character encoding to UTF-32
*/
std::ios_base& FromUtf32(std::ios_base& os) {
    os.iword(SourceStreamEncoding::sourceEnc_xalloc) = EUnicodeEnc_UTF32;
    return os;
}

/*!
\brief Overrides \c std::ostream::flush()
\details Converts the buffer to the correct character encoding then flushes buffer
after writing its content to a storage device
*/
std::ostream &CFileManagerOStream::flush()
{
    switch (os.iword(SourceStreamEncoding::sourceEnc_xalloc))
    {
        case EUnicodeEnc_UTF8:
            characterEncoder.FromUTF8(...);
        break;
        case EUnicodeEnc_UTF16:
            characterEncoder.FromUTF16(...);
        break;
        case EUnicodeEnc_UTF32:
            characterEncoder.FromUTF32(...);
        break;
    }
    return (*this);
}

// Now I can do as follows:
int main()
{
    CFileManagerOStream outFile("MultipleUtf8Strings.dat"); // Custom std::ostream
    ...
#ifdef _WINDOWS
    CTcpStreamUtf16 largeBlobUtf16Stream;
    ...
    outFile << FromUtf16 << largeBlobUtf16Stream;
#else
    CTcpStreamUtf32 largeBlobUtf32Stream;
    ...
    outFile << FromUtf32 << largeBlobUtf32Stream;
#endif
}

Additionally, I've added the following manipulator that takes a single paramater:

class FromEnc
{
    public:
        explicit FromEnc(int i) : i_(i) {}
        int i_;
    private:
        template <class charT, class Traits>
        friend std::basic_ostream<charT, Traits>& operator<<(std::basic_ostream<charT, Traits>& os, const FromEnc& w) {
            os.iword(SourceStreamEncoding::sourceEnc_xalloc) = w.i_;
            return os;
        }
};

, so now I can also do as follows:

outFile << FromEnc(EUnicodeEnc_UTF16) << largeBlobUtf16Stream;