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.

Answer 1

fstream are great but I will go a little deeper and tell you about RAII.

The problem with a classic example is that you are forced to close the file by yourself, meaning that you will have to bend your architecture to this need. RAII makes use of the automatic destructor call in C++ to close the file for you.

Update: seems that std::fstream already implements RAII so the code below is useless. I'll keep it here for posterity and as an example of RAII.

class FileOpener
{
public:
    FileOpener(std::fstream& file, const char* fileName): m_file(file)
    { 
        m_file.open(fileName); 
    }
    ~FileOpeneer()
    { 
        file.close(); 
    }

private:
    std::fstream& m_file;
};

You can now use this class in your code like this:

int nsize = 10;
char *somedata;
ifstream myfile;
FileOpener opener(myfile, "");
myfile.read(somedata,nsize);
// myfile is closed automatically when opener destructor is called

Learning how RAII works can save you some headaches and some major memory management bugs.