ostringstream and ends

Question

I've been working with somebody else's code and noticed that on all uses of ostringsteam they are in the habit of explicitly appending std::ends.

This is something I've never done and have never encountered a problem.

It doesn't appear to, but should std::ends make any difference in the following code?

ostringstream message;
message << "Hello world, version " << 2 /* << std::ends ??? */;
printf( "%s\n", message.str().c_str() );

Answer 1

Appending std::ends is nonsense here since stringstream’s c_str returns a null-terminated char*. The same was not the case for the (now deprecated) strstreams where appending std::ends was necessary. I believe the author simply didn’t know of this changed behaviour.

Answer 2

It shouldn't, c_str() returns NUL-terminated string, anyway.