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.