C++

27.5    Manipulating and Formatting Streams

How characters are input or output in a stream is controlled by so-called flags, which are defined in the ios_base base class. You can think of flags as an array of bits, where the values can be either 1 or 0. Individual bits, of course, do not make a value, so the bits are stored in a variable. Depending on the set bits, the value of the variable changes, and each value has a special meaning. All flags have a default setting, where, for example, without further specification, all integral values are output in decimal (dec) notation.

You can directly change the format flags by using methods like setf(), unsetf(), or flags() from the ios_base class. However, a better alternative has been available for ...