STL without memcpy

[Esam]

I wanted to write a quick test program to send a message with variable length fields in the message. Typically I would use some sort of dynamically allocated c-like buffer and just memcpy the elements of different sized into their proper positions. For example:

char Buffer[8192];
unsigned short count = 512;
char temp_char = 3, temp_char2 = 255;

*(unsigned short*)(&Buffer[0]) = 1;  
*(unsigned short*)(&Buffer[2]) = count;
Buffer[4] = temp_char;
Buffer[5] = temp_char2;

I would like to use the STL to do this a little more elegantly and c++-ish, but I don't know how to go about doing it the best way. I could do something like this:

deque<char> Buffer(8192);
deque<char>::iterator buff_iter = Buffer.begin();
unsigned short count = 512;
char temp_char = 3, temp_char2 = 255;

*buff_iter = 0; // High Byte
buff_iter++;
*buff_iter = 1; // Low Byte
buff_iter++;

*buff_iter = ((count >> 8) & 0xFF); // High Byte
buff_iter++;
*buff_iter = (count & 0xFF); // Low Byte
buff_iter++;

*buff_iter = temp_char;
buff_iter++;
*buff_iter = temp_char2;

However, that seems worse to me. Could someone give me some ideas on a good way to handle packing data words of different sizes into an STL container?

Thanks!

Btw... I didn't actually attempt to compile this so it may not be 100% syntactically correct.

[Banfa]

Rather than just instanciating a variable of type deque(char) you could create a subclass of that type and add you own methods to insert data

class message : public deque<char>
{
public:
    message();
    message(int defaultBufferSize);
    ~message();

    AddChar(unsigned char data);
    AddShort(unsigned short data);
    AddString(string data);

    // etc
}

Then your main cod becomes

message Buffer(8192);
unsigned short count = 512;
char temp_char = 3, temp_char2 = 255;

Buffer.AddShort(1);
Buffer.AddShort(count);
Buffer.AddChar(temp_char);
Buffer.AddChar(temp_char2);

If you wished rather than add methods you could override the += operator giving

message Buffer(8192);
unsigned short count = 512;
char temp_char = 3, temp_char2 = 255;

Buffer += (unsigned short)1;
Buffer += count;
Buffer += temp_char;
Buffer += temp_char2;

I have left you to actually implement the functions/operators.

[Esam]

Hey that's a good idea, thanks!