How do I read an entire file into a std::string in C++?

Question

How do I read a file into a std::string, i.e., read the whole file at once?

Text or binary mode should be specified by the caller. The solution should b

Answer 1

See this answer on a similar question.

For your convenience, I'm reposting CTT's solution:

string readFile2(const string &fileName)
{
    ifstream ifs(fileName.c_str(), ios::in | ios::binary | ios::ate);

    ifstream::pos_type fileSize = ifs.tellg();
    ifs.seekg(0, ios::beg);

    vector bytes(fileSize);
    ifs.read(bytes.data(), fileSize);

    return string(bytes.data(), fileSize);
}

This solution resulted in about 20% faster execution times than the other answers presented here, when taking the average of 100 runs against the text of Moby Dick (1.3M). Not bad for a portable C++ solution, I would like to see the results of mmap'ing the file ;)