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

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