Copy a streambuf's contents to a string

I don't know whether it counts as "excessive copying", but you can use a stringstream:

std::ostringstream ss;
ss << someStreamBuf;
std::string s = ss.str();

Like, to read everything from stdin into a string, do

std::ostringstream ss;
ss << std::cin.rdbuf();
std::string s = ss.str();

Alternatively, you may also use a istreambuf_iterator. You will have to measure whether this or the above way is faster - i don't know.

std::string s((istreambuf_iterator<char>(someStreamBuf)), 
               istreambuf_iterator<char>());

Note that someStreamBuf above is meant to represent a streambuf*, so take its address as appropriate. Also note the additional parentheses around the first argument in the last example, so that it doesn't interpret it as a function declaration returning a string and taking an iterator and another function pointer ("most vexing parse").

It's really buried in the docs...

Given boost::asio::streambuf b, with size_t buf_size ...

boost::asio::streambuf::const_buffers_type bufs = b.data();
std::string str(boost::asio::buffers_begin(bufs),
                boost::asio::buffers_begin(bufs) + buf_size);

Another possibility with boost::asio::streambuf is to use boost::asio::buffer_cast<const char*>() in conjunction with boost::asio::streambuf::data() and boost::asio::streambuf::consume() like this:

const char* header=boost::asio::buffer_cast<const char*>(readbuffer.data());
//Do stuff with header, maybe construct a std::string with std::string(header,header+length)
readbuffer.consume(length);

This won't work with normal streambufs and might be considered dirty, but it seems to be the fastest way of doing it.