Land of Lisp

String Streams: The Oddball Type

Streams are usually used for communicating with the outside world from within a Lisp program. One exception to this is the string stream, which simply makes a string look like a stream. In the same way you can read or write to external resources with other types of streams, a string stream will let you read or write to a string.

You can create string streams with the make-string-output-stream and make-string-input-stream commands. Following is an example that uses make-string-output-stream:

> (defparameter foo (make-string-output-stream))
> (princ "This will go into foo. " foo)
> (princ "This will also go into foo. " foo)
> (get-output-stream-string foo)
"This will go into foo. This will also go into foo. "

You may ...