Thread: Convert to string w/o _itoa?

Is there a way to convert something like an int or an unsigned short to a string without using _itoa? The reason I ask is that I'm using a std::string to hold a date. The month, day and year components of the date are unsigned shorts. I want to copy and then append these elements along with "\" to create a human readable date. The only way that I know to convert an unsigned short to a string so that I can append it to a std::string is using the _itoa function. The problem with this is that it requires me to pass in a buffer to hold the result, and this buffer must be a char* or void* (I forget which, but it doesn't matter). This would basically require me to create a useless buffer just to pass in to _itoa and then delete it. I think this is pretty harmless, but hardly elegent or efficient, is there a better way?

In case it helps, here is the code that I'm working with...

Code:

string GetFileCreationTime(char* pFileName)
{
	string pFileCreationDate(11, '\0');	//buffer to hold the date
	char* pUseless = new char[5];	//useless buffer needed for _itoa
	WIN32_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DATA wfad;	//file attribute data structure
	SYSTEMTIME st;	//systemtime structure
	
	ZeroMemory(&wfad, sizeof(WIN32_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DATA));	//init memory
	ZeroMemory(&st, sizeof(SYSTEMTIME));	//init memory

	GetFileAttributesEx(pFileName, GetFileExInfoStandard, &wfad);	//get file information
	FileTimeToSystemTime(&wfad.ftCreationTime, &st);	//convert to human readable time

	pFileCreationDate = _itoa(st.wMonth, pUseless, 10);
	pFileCreationDate.append("\\");
	pFileCreationDate.append(_itoa(st.wDay, pUseless, 10));
	pFileCreationDate.append("\\");
	pFileCreationDate.append(_itoa(st.wYear, pUseless, 10));
	
	delete [] pUseless;
	return pFileCreationDate;
}

That is some cool coding HKMP5. I didn't even know such a thing existed

Thanks a bunch!