it's surprisingly hard to clear something with a .clear() member function... but stringstream::clear clears the flags, does not reset the stringstream contents to nothing. The way I was doing it was first do a ss.seekp(0); and then overwrite the text. That's fine and works good enough, but only IF the text you overwrite with is longer than what you had in it before. But now i've gotten to an area where it's shorter (much). You could cheat and fill it with spaces (enough to make sure everything's gone) but that doesn't work if you're aligning text right (plus it's not the proper way to do it, for sure). I've tried flushing the string stream, ending it (that didn't even compile), clearing it, ignoring it... I'm fresh out of ideas, and the documentation on it is so unclear it's no help at all. [edited by - kVandaele on May 30, 2004 1:52:32 PM]

ss.str(""); ?

and here I was thinking stringstream::str was only for output. I have much to learn, masta...