Most elegant way to get from (ex) to (void *)?

[Duraid Madina]

Hi all,

    What's the most elegant way (okay, fastest way) to translate between 
expressions and plain-old arrays of bytes? (of course, I am interested 
in both directions!)

    Right now I've got a really kludgy system that takes the expression, 
'archives' it, sends that archive into an 'strstream' buffer, and then 
grabs the 'string' backing that strstream, et voila.

    Any better ideas? ;-)

    Thanks in advance,

    Duraid