std::cout / streams question

Hello, I have several cout statements in my code, that all have to print similar strings.

Example:

Code:

std::cout << "WARNING: corrupt CHARACTER_LIST_REQUEST packet received from: \n"
                << "SystemID: " << sourceSystem << "\n"
                << "IP: " << (net->getSystemAddress(sourceSystem)).ToString(true) << "\n"
                << (dataLength < 8 ? "packet too small" : "packet too large") << std::endl;

The parts where it prints the SystemID and IP are needed in every warning/error message, so I'd like to create a function that does it for me. Ofcourse I could easily write a function that uses cout itself, but I'd like to be able to put it in the cout statement itself.

Like this:

Code:

std::cout << "WARNING: corrupt CHARACTER_LIST_REQUEST packet received from: \n"
                << systemIP(sourceSystem)
                << (dataLength < 8 ? "packet too small" : "packet too large") << std::endl;

I could let systemIP return a char* or std::string, but then I'd have to somehow deal with deallocating them.

How can this be done? I'd like to only have that single function call line in the std::cout.

PS. this isn't a big deal, I'm mainly asking to learn something from it.

If you return a std::string, you have nothing to worry about.

So this is ok?

Code:

getIPStr(SystemID systemID)
{
   stringstream ss;
   ss << "SystemID: " << systemID
      << "IP: " << (net->getSystemAddress(systemID)).ToString(true);// << endl;
   string s = ss.str();
   return s;
}

..

std::cout << "WARNING: corrupt CHARACTER_LIST_REQUEST packet received from: \n"
                  << getIPStr(sourceSystem) << "\n"
                  << (dataLength < 8 ? "packet too small" : "packet too large") << std::endl;

You missed the return type, but yes, it's safe since std::string will destruct when not needed and delete its memory with it.

Thank you