This only works for a small subset of typeid names since many of them are not valid XML tags (for one thing any template class cannot be used). And you really do not wan to leave out the variable name. I really think the library should provide an archive OPTION to include the typename enclosed in quotations (preferrably, primitive types should have this options too). Sean ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Ramey To: boost-users@lists.boost.org Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2005 11:44 AM Subject: Re: [Boost-users] How to select the name of classdefinitioninsteadofvariable name in XML archive Something like this might be made to work. Be aware that the tag name will vary across compilers. For the serialization system this won't be problem as the tag name really isn't used for anything. But, depending on what you plan to use the tag name for, this might or might not be a problem. Robert Ramey "Piyush Kapadia" <piyush.kapadia@gmail.com> wrote in message news:435b6d4a.334ce710.5f89.ffffb4c0@mx.gmail.com... So instead of oa << BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(T); can we use following to have type name printed in xml file ? oa << boost::serialization::make_nvp(typeid(T).name(), T);