Reading binary istream byte by byte

Question

I was attempting to read a binary file byte by byte using an ifstream. I\'ve used istream methods like get() before to read entire chunks of a binary file at once without a

Answer 1

source.get()

will give you a single byte. It is unformatted input function. operator>> is formatted input function that may imply skipping whitespace characters.

Answer 2

Why are you using formatted extraction, rather than .read()?

Answer 3

there is a read() member function in which you can specify the number of bytes.

Answer 4

As others mentioned, you should use istream::read(). But, if you must use formatted extraction, consider std::noskipws.

Answer 5

The >> extractors are for formatted input; they skip white space (by default). For single character unformatted input, you can use istream::get() (returns an int, either EOF if the read fails, or a value in the range [0,UCHAR_MAX]) or istream::get(char&) (puts the character read in the argument, returns something which converts to bool, true if the read succeeds, and false if it fails.