I need to use a variable length array to store binary data AND strings of text. I''ve looked at string and vectors. Vectors seem the obvious choice like: typedef vector ByteArray ,however as easy as it would be to implement I also need the ability to -copy in text easily (Rather than looping to fill the ByteArray with [] -Copy a struct on top of it. ie, I have a bitfield struct that will form a message. In C I would have done this easily by just mallocing out a hunk of ram and copying the data right in with memcpy. How can I do this in a C++ kind of way? gimp

hmmm, so you want a single variable to contain any kind of data? Sounds like your talking about using void pointers (void*), but that''s not a very C++ way of going about things (since you asked).

If this is a message to be sent from one task to another, you might want to make a base class message, then derive each message type from that message.

But if you just want to go for raw storage, you can create a byte vector (vector&ltchar> or vector&ltunsigned char>), then just use STL copy and have nasty casts all over the place:
struct MyStruct
{
int a;
char b;
double c;
} s;
copy ((char*) &s, (char*) &s + sizeof s, vec.begin ());

This would work, but you can see how very ugly and unintuitive (i.e. somebody reading this would say, "what the hell is he doing?!") this solution is. Try seeing if a class heirarchy will solve your problem instead.

store a vector of pairs.

eg:

std::vector< std::pair >

just replace the int with whatever you''re binary data is.

access example:

    std::vector< std::pair<int, string> >::iterator IT;for(IT = myVector.begin(); IT != myVector.end(); ++IT){    cout << IT->first << " : " << IT->second << endl;}    

i have some time on my hands, so i''ll show how to add to the vector too...

    void foo(std::vector< std::pair<int, std::string> >& myVector,         int n,         std::string s){    //make a pair containing int value ''n'' and string ''s''    std::pair<int, std::string> thePair(n, s);    myVector.push_back(thePair);    //OR, for even less to type:    myVector.push_back(std::make_pair(n, s));    //note: that make_pair does not work for me - which is why i showed the other way first.    //if i''m doing the make_pair bit wrong - someone please correct me!}    

Thanks guys...

Here is a better explaination of what I''m doing. The core part of the game is driven by message queue''s. For example, when a new packet is recieved from the server it is unpacked in to a number of individual messages. Each message is represented by binary data, maybe a few bytes. Next from the command line, console, and config files I recieve text based messages like "map blackforest".

I have pluggable factories reading the queue and passing the data to each processing function. Now initially the obvious choice for storing the data was a unsigned char*, that allowed me to copy in the say 5 byte message or a 12 byte text message. My binary data didn''t get messed with as the char was unsigned, but character data was still validly represented. I could easily copy in the binary data from structs too or ditto with the text messages...

I was trying to be a good gimp and do it the c++ way but increasingly the C way looks easier...