Standard Library Support

cereal supports most of the containers and classes found in the C++ standard library out of the box.

TLDR Version

cereal supports pretty much everything in the C++ standard library. Include the proper header from cereal to enable support (e.g. <cereal/types/vector.hpp>. See the doxygen docs for a complete list of supported types.

STL Support

To use a type found in the standard library, just include the proper header from #include <cereal/types/xxxx.hpp> and serialize data as you normally would:

// type support
#include <cereal/types/map.hpp>
#include <cereal/types/vector.hpp>
#include <cereal/types/string.hpp>
#include <cereal/types/complex.hpp>

// for doing the actual serialization
#include <cereal/archives/json.hpp>
#include <iostream>

class Stuff
{
  public:
    Stuff() = default;

    void fillData()
    {
      data = { {"real", { {1.0f, 0},
                          {2.2f, 0},
                          {3.3f, 0} }},
               {"imaginary", { {0, -1.0f},
                               {0, -2.9932f},
                               {0, -3.5f} }} };
    }

  private:
    std::map<std::string, std::vector<std::complex<float>>> data;
    
    friend class cereal::access;

    template <class Archive>
    void serialize( Archive & ar )
    {
      ar( CEREAL_NVP(data) );
    }
};

int main()
{
  cereal::JSONOutputArchive output(std::cout); // stream to cout

  Stuff myStuff;
  myStuff.fillData();

  output( cereal::make_nvp("best data ever", myStuff) );
}

which will produce the following JSON:

{
    "best data ever": {
        "data": [
            {
                "key": "imaginary",
                "value": [
                    {
                        "real": 0,
                        "imag": -1
                    },
                    {
                        "real": 0,
                        "imag": -2.9932
                    },
                    {
                        "real": 0,
                        "imag": -3.5
                    }
                ]
            },
            {
                "key": "real",
                "value": [
                    {
                        "real": 1,
                        "imag": 0
                    },
                    {
                        "real": 2.2,
                        "imag": 0
                    },
                    {
                        "real": 3.3,
                        "imag": 0
                    }
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
}

If you find yourself attempting to serialize a standard library type and receiving compile time errors about cereal being unable to find an appropriate serialization function, you have likely forgotten to include the type support.

More information on the archives and functions used in the above example can be found in the serialization functions and serialization archives sections of the documentation.