Writing binary to std::fstream using the << operator

Question

For some reason this sort code is not working as I would expect:

std::fstream theFile;
theFile.open(, std::ios::beg |std::ios::out|std::i         


        

Answer 1

You need to typecast the values first as a char, otherwise the iostream library sees the values as int and formats them as a readable string.

theFile << (char)1 << (char)25;

Answer 2

The << operator's whole purpose is to write formatted data to a stream. If you want to write binary data, you should use ostream::write() or ostream::put().