Since I couldn't find any information in my C++ books, I checked the web and wanted to make sure I understood it. I figured I needed to do this: std::ostringstream strout; strout << "Computer Score: " << g_comp_score << std::endl; Then if I were to put std::cout << strout.str(); It should print out "Computer Score: (whatever number g_comp_score is)", right? To clear strout, I would have to do: strout.str(""); Am I correct? Another thing is when I display the string (using SDL), a little box comes out after the number. If it was supposed to be 1, you would see 1[little box].

That works! Thanks.

Note that you don't need to do this if you're just going to output directly to cout (the whole reason the stringstream trick works is because the *stream interface* provides this functionality, and the console output stream certainly provides that interface too). Of course you will need it if you're constructing a string to pass to SDL :) (Remember that .str() yields a std::string; if you need to pass a const char* to some API function, you can chain a couple calls: .str().c_str(), and you're good to go.)

I just put the cout there so I could keep the example simple. I just wanted the string to pass it into my text renderer function which would then use the string and convert it into a c string for the SDL function call. Thanks for letting me know about the chaining, I did not know that.