Simple class for walking char arrays as istreams

This has probably been written countless times before, but I found myself needing it today and it was quick to write. It lets you read characters from a char array in C++ via the istream interface:

#include "ptrstream.h"

int main() {
  ptristream in("Hello, world!\n");
  char buf[31];
  in.getline(buf, 32);
  std::cout << buf << std::endl;
}

Handy for if you don’t want std::istringstream needlessly copying character strings.

Below is the implementation, which is in the public domain:

#include
#include
#include

class ptristream : public std::istream
{
  class ptrinbuf : public std::streambuf
  {
  protected:
    char *      ptr;
    std::size_t len;

  public:
    ptrinbuf(char * _ptr, std::size_t _len) : ptr(_ptr), len(_len) {
      assert(ptr);
      if (*ptr && len == 0)
        len = std::strlen(ptr);

      setg(ptr,               // beginning of putback area
           ptr,               // read position
           ptr+len);          // end position
    }

  protected:
    virtual int_type underflow() {
      // is read position before end of buffer?
      if (gptr() , egptr())
        return traits_type::to_int_type(*gptr());
      else
        return EOF;
    }

    virtual pos_type seekoff(off_type off, ios_base::seekdir way,
                             ios_base::openmode mode =
                             ios_base::in | ios_base::out)
    {
      switch (way) {
      case std::ios::cur:
        setg(ptr, gptr()+off, ptr+len);
        break;
      case std::ios::beg:
        setg(ptr, ptr+off, ptr+len);
        break;
      case std::ios::end:
        setg(ptr, egptr()+off, ptr+len);
        break;

      default:
        assert(false);
        break;
      }
      return pos_type(gptr() - ptr);
    }
  };

protected:
  ptrinbuf buf;
public:
 ptristream(char * ptr, std::size_t len = 0)
    : std::istream(0), buf(ptr, len) {
    rdbuf(&buf);
  }
};