using fstream to read every character including spaces and newline

Question

I wanted to use fstream to read a txt file.

I am using inFile >> characterToConvert, but the problem is that this omits any spaces an

Answer 1

As Charles Bailey correctly pointed out, you don't need fstream's services just to read bytes. So forget this iostream silliness, use fopen/fread and be done with it. C stdio is part of C++, you know ;)

Answer 2

Another better way is to use istreambuf_iterator, and the sample code is as below:

ifstream inputFile("test.data");

string fileData(istreambuf_iterator<char>(inputFile), istreambuf_iterator<char>());

Answer 3

You can call int fstream::get(), which will read a single character from the stream. You can also use istream& fstream::read(char*, streamsize), which does the same operation as get(), just over multiple characters. The given links include examples of using each method.

I also recommend reading and writing in binary mode. This allows ASCII control characters to be properly read from and written to files. Otherwise, an encrypt/decrypt operation pair might result in non-identical files. To do this, you open the filestream with the ios::binary flag. With a binary file, you want to use the read() method.

Answer 4

ifstream ifile(path);
std::string contents((std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(ifile)), std::istreambuf_iterator<char>());
ifile.close();

Answer 5

std::ifstream ifs( "filename.txt" );

std::string str( ( std::istreambuf_iterator<char>( ifs ) ), 
                 std::istreambuf_iterator<char>()
               );

Answer 6

For encryption, you're better off opening your file in binary mode. Use something like this to put the bytes of a file into a vector:

std::ifstream ifs("foobar.txt", std::ios::binary);

ifs.seekg(0, std::ios::end);
std::ifstream::pos_type filesize = ifs.tellg();
ifs.seekg(0, std::ios::beg);

std::vector<char> bytes(filesize);

ifs.read(&bytes[0], filesize);

Edit: fixed a subtle bug as per the comments.