How do you open a file in C++?

Question

I want to open a file for reading, the C++ way. I need to be able to do it for:

• text files, which would involve some sort of read line function.

• binary files, which would provide a way to read raw data into a char* buffer.

Solution 1

There are three ways to do this, depending on your needs. You could use the old-school C way and call fopen/fread/fclose, or you could use the C++ fstream facilities (ifstream/ofstream), or if you're using MFC, use the CFile class, which provides functions to accomplish actual file operations.

All of these are suitable for both text and binary, though none have a specific readline functionality. What you'd most likely do instead in that case is use the fstream classes (fstream.h) and use the stream operators (<< and >>) or the read function to read/write blocks of text:

int nsize = 10;
std::vector<char> somedata(nsize);
ifstream myfile;
myfile.open("<path to file>");
myfile.read(somedata.data(), nsize);
myfile.close();

Note that, if you're using Visual Studio 2005 or higher, traditional fstream may not be available (there's a new Microsoft implementation, which is slightly different, but accomplishes the same thing).

Solution 2

You need to use an ifstream if you just want to read (use an ofstream to write, or an fstream for both).

To open a file in text mode, do the following:

ifstream in("filename.ext", ios_base::in); // the in flag is optional

To open a file in binary mode, you just need to add the "binary" flag.

ifstream in2("filename2.ext", ios_base::in | ios_base::binary ); 

Use the ifstream.read() function to read a block of characters (in binary or text mode). Use the getline() function (it's global) to read an entire line.

Solution 3

To open and read a text file line per line, you could use the following:

// define your file name
string file_name = "data.txt";

// attach an input stream to the wanted file
ifstream input_stream(file_name);

// check stream status
if (!input_stream) cerr << "Can't open input file!";

// file contents  
vector<string> text;

// one line
string line;

// extract all the text from the input file
while (getline(input_stream, line)) {

    // store each line in the vector
    text.push_back(line);
}

To open and read a binary file you need to explicitly declare the reading format in your input stream to be binary, and read memory that has no explicit interpretation using stream member function read():

// define your file name
string file_name = "binary_data.bin";

// attach an input stream to the wanted file
ifstream input_stream(file_name, ios::binary);

// check stream status
if (!input_stream) cerr << "Can't open input file!";

// use function that explicitly specifies the amount of block memory read 
int memory_size = 10;

// allocate 10 bytes of memory on heap
char* dynamic_buffer = new char[memory_size];

// read 10 bytes and store in dynamic_buffer
file_name.read(dynamic_buffer, memory_size);

When doing this you'll need to #include the header : <iostream>

Solution 4

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
using namespace std;

int main () {
  ofstream file;
  file.open ("codebind.txt");
  file << "Please writr this text to a file.\n this text is written using C++\n";
  file.close();
  return 0;
}

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