Read whole ASCII file into C++ std::string [duplicate]

Answer 1

Update: Turns out that this method, while following STL idioms well, is actually surprisingly inefficient! Don't do this with large files. (See: http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-to-read-in-file-in-c.html)

You can make a streambuf iterator out of the file and initialize the string with it:

#include <string>
#include <fstream>
#include <streambuf>

std::ifstream t("file.txt");
std::string str((std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(t)),
                 std::istreambuf_iterator<char>());

Not sure where you're getting the t.open("file.txt", "r") syntax from. As far as I know that's not a method that std::ifstream has. It looks like you've confused it with C's fopen.

Edit: Also note the extra parentheses around the first argument to the string constructor. These are essential. They prevent the problem known as the "most vexing parse", which in this case won't actually give you a compile error like it usually does, but will give you interesting (read: wrong) results.

Following KeithB's point in the comments, here's a way to do it that allocates all the memory up front (rather than relying on the string class's automatic reallocation):

#include <string>
#include <fstream>
#include <streambuf>

std::ifstream t("file.txt");
std::string str;

t.seekg(0, std::ios::end);   
str.reserve(t.tellg());
t.seekg(0, std::ios::beg);

str.assign((std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(t)),
            std::istreambuf_iterator<char>());

Answer 2

You may not find this in any book or site but I found out that it works pretty well:

ifstream ifs ("filename.txt");
string s;
getline (ifs, s, (char) ifs.eof());

Answer 3

I figured out another way that works with most istreams, including std::cin!

std::string readFile()
{
    stringstream str;
    ifstream stream("Hello_World.txt");
    if(stream.is_open())
    {
        while(stream.peek() != EOF)
        {
            str << (char) stream.get();
        }
        stream.close();
        return str.str();
    }
}