You have to do two steps. Finding an integral type large enough to store the values. You could use unsigned long, but the values could be negative. Then you could use long but the values could extend into the range of unsigned long. So there is not really a fit-it-all type. There is a trick … Read more
Edit 2012-04-11 rve quite rightly commented about lexical_cast’s performance, providing a link: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_49_0/doc/html/boost_lexical_cast/performance.html I don’t have access right now to boost 1.49, but I do remember making my code faster on an older version. So I guess: the following answer is still valid (if only for learning purposes) there was probably an optimization introduced somewhere … Read more