Can anyone explain the code about cin.tie() in C++? - c++

// redefine tied object
#include <iostream> // std::ostream, std::cout, std::cin
#include <fstream> // std::ofstream
int main () {
std::ostream *prevstr;
std::ofstream ofs;
ofs.open ("test.txt");
std::cout << "tie example:\n";
*std::cin.tie() << "This is inserted into cout";
prevstr = std::cin.tie (&ofs);
*std::cin.tie() << "This is inserted into the file";
std::cin.tie (prevstr);
ofs.close();
return 0;
}
We can get same output if we remove the line:
std::cin.tie (prevstr);
Why is this?

std::cin.tie(prevstr) doesn't do anything in your original code because you didn't perform any operations on the stream afterward. *std::cin.tie() << "This is inserted into the file2" prints to stdout because std::cin.tie(prevstr) ties std::cin back to std::cout. prevstr points to the stream that std::cin was tied to before you set it to ofs, which is std::cout. If that line wasn't there it would have printed to the file.

Related

How to read back what I just wrote to a file?

I've been trying to write a program to open a file in both read and write mode:
#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main(){
fstream obj;
obj.open("hello.txt",ios::in|ios::out);
if (!obj){
cout << "File not opened" <<endl;
return 1;
}
obj << "Hi How are you" ;
char c;
while (!obj.eof()){
obj.get(c);
cout << c;
}
obj.close();
return 0;
}
When I compile this program on Visual Studio Code on Windows, though the text "Hi how are you" is printed in the file, the contents of the file are not printed on my screen. Can someone tell me what might be the problem?
Resetting the position indicator with seekp to 0 helps, because both output and input indicators are set to the end of file after write operation (you can read them with tellp tellg).
obj << "Hi How are you" ;
obj.seekp(0);
char c;
while (!obj.eof()){
obj.get(c);
cout << c;
}
Considering avoiding using obj.eof(), you can e.g. read your file line by line:
std::string line;
std::getline(obj, line);
std::cout << line << std::endl;
or in the loop:
while (std::getline(obj, line)) // here std::basic_ios<CharT,Traits>::operator bool is used to check if operation succeeded
{
std::cout << line << std::endl;
}
You got two problems there: buffering and seek position.
Buffering:
When you write the text with obj << "Hi How are you, you just write it into the buffer and the text gets written into the file after flushing the buffer. You can adjust which buffer type you want to use. The easiest way is to write std::endl after your text if you use line buffering.
A better explaination is already here
Seek Position:
You are reading from the last position in your file. You have to manually change the read position to the first character in the file, then you are done.

Open a file with C++ and output the text that is in the file

I am trying to open a file with C++ and output the text that is in the file. I cannot seem to figure out what I am doing wrong. Here is what I have so far.
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <fstream>
#include <cstdlib>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
char fileName[50];
ifstream infile;
cout << "Enter the name of the file you would like to open: ";
cin.getline(fileName, 50);
infile.open(fileName);
if(!infile.is_open())
{
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
char line[75];
infile >> line;
while (infile.good())
{
cout << line << " ";
infile >> line;
}
system("pause");
return 0;
}
After I input the file name and press enter the CMD prompt just closes. I know that the file exist, but I cannot figure out why it is exiting. Obviously it is because of the exit command, but it should be open. What am I doing wrong?
You don't need to read/write the file line by line; C++ already supports to copy the file in one step. You also should use string instead of char[] for your strings; on one hand it means that you don't need to restrict the maximal length of your strings to some arbitrary length (what if your file's pathname has more than 50 characters, or the file has lines with more than 75 characters?
Note also that your file copying code is erroneous: It will remove all whitespace from the file, as infile >> line does not read a line (use readline for that), but a word, discarding whitespace.
Also, your code should give an error message if it couldn't open the file, instead of just silently returning (you do provide an error return, which is very good, but unless you call it from something that actually gives you feedback on the error return, you'll never learn about it.
Finally, the system("pause") should probably be done in an RAII class, so it is guaranteed to be exited on return (however, exit will not call destructors, so unless you want to use atexit, you should use return in `main`` instead). A better idea would, however, be to not put this into the code, but instead run it in a terminal that doesn't immediately close after the program finishes.
Here's a program that implements those suggestions:
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <cstdlib>
int main()
{
// make sure that system("pause") is called on all exit paths
struct cleanup
{
~cleanup() { std::system("pause"); }
} do_cleanup;
// get the file name
std::string filename;
std::cout << "Enter the name of the file you would like to open: ";
std::getline(std::cin,filename);
if (!std::cin)
{
std::cerr << "Failed to read the file name.\n";
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
// open the file
std::ifstream infile(filename.c_str());
if (!infile)
{
std::cerr << "Could not open file: " << filename << "\n";
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
// print the file
std::cout << infile.rdbuf();
// close the file
infile.close();
if (!infile)
{
std::cerr << "Could not properly close file: " << filename << "\n";
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
There is no need to use a char[]. You've even #included string so just use that.
string fileName;
cout << "Enter the name of the file you would like to open: ";
cin >> fileName;
// or
// getline(cin, fileName);
ifstream infile(fileName);
if (infile.fail()) {
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
string line;
while (infile >> line) {
cout << line << " ";
}
system("pause");
return 0;
I also modified a few things to make it a bit cleaner.
Thanks for the help. Yes the file was in the wrong folder. It was a newb oversight!

Weird behavior with ifstreams and rdbuf()

I've noticed that using .rdbuf() on an ifstream seems to change it somehow. The following code should show the problem.
#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main(int argc, const char * argv[]) {
ifstream ifs("Sample.csv");
cout << "Reading buffer: " << endl;
cout << ifs.rdbuf(); // Outputs buffer as expected
cout << "Reading buffer again: " << endl;
cout << ifs.rdbuf(); // Returns nothing
return 0;
}
The reason this is bothering me is that I'm currently trying to copy the contents of one text file into another using ofstream ofs; ofs << ifs.rdbuf(). This works fine but makes reading from ifs using getline(ifs, str) fail, effectively "breaking" the stream.
This isn't particularly "weird"; it's the same stream behaviour you see every day. rdbuf isn't like std::stringstream::str() and it isn't magic — it's a pointer to the buffer, that your cout is then reading from just as you would read from the original stream yourself:
std::stringstream ss("1");
int x;
if (ss >> x)
cout << x;
if (ss >> x) // doesn't work a second time; "1" is already extracted
cout << x;
As your stream is a file stream, you can seek it back to the beginning to start from scratch (which will inherently do the same to its underlying buffer).
ifs.rdbuf() returns a pointer to the ifs's corresponding stream buffer object. Sending it to std::cout via << overload pulls information from the stream until the end of the buffer is reached (eof). Calling .rdbuf() again returns "nothing" because there's nothing to read at the end of the buffer. The buffer seek position be explicitly reset to zero by calling ifs.seekg (0);.

edit: trouble checking if file is empty or not, what am I doing wrong?

Edit: changed my question to be more accurate of the situation
I'm trying to open up a text file (create it if it doesnt exist,open it if it doesnt). It is the same input file as output.
ofstream oFile("goalsFile.txt");
fstream iFile("goalsFile.txt");
string goalsText;
string tempBuffer;
//int fileLength = 0;
bool empty = false;
if (oFile.is_open())
{
if (iFile.is_open())
{
iFile >> tempBuffer;
iFile.seekg(0, iFile.end);
size_t fileLength = iFile.tellg();
iFile.seekg(0, iFile.beg);
if (fileLength == 0)
{
cout << "Set a new goal\n" << "Goal Name:"; //if I end debugging her the file ends up being empty
getline(cin, goalSet);
oFile << goalSet;
oFile << ";";
cout << endl;
cout << "Goal Cost:";
getline(cin, tempBuffer);
goalCost = stoi(tempBuffer);
oFile << goalCost;
cout << endl;
}
}
}
Couple of issues. For one, if the file exist and has text within it, it still goes into the if loop that would normally ask me to set a new goal. I can't seem to figure out what's happening here.
The problem is simply that you are using buffered IO streams. Despite the fact that they reference the same file underneath, they have completely separate buffers.
// open the file for writing and erase existing contents.
std::ostream out(filename);
// open the now empty file for reading.
std::istream in(filename);
// write to out's buffer
out << "hello";
At this point, "hello" may not have been written to disk, the only guarantee is that it's in the output buffer of out. To force it to be written to disk you could use
out << std::endl; // new line + flush
out << std::flush; // just a flush
that means that we've committed our output to disk, but the input buffer is still untouched at this point, and so the file still appears to be empty.
In order for your input file to see what you've written to the output file, you'd need to use sync.
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
static const char* filename = "testfile.txt";
int main()
{
std::string hello;
{
std::ofstream out(filename);
std::ifstream in(filename);
out << "hello\n";
in >> hello;
std::cout << "unsync'd read got '" << hello << "'\n";
}
{
std::ofstream out(filename);
std::ifstream in(filename);
out << "hello\n";
out << std::flush;
in.sync();
in >> hello;
std::cout << "sync'd read got '" << hello << "'\n";
}
}
The next problem you'll run into trying to do this with buffered streams is the need to clear() the eof bit on the input stream every time more data is written to the file...
Try Boost::FileSystem::is_empty which test if your file is empty. I read somewhere that using fstream's is not a good way to test empty files.

How to write console output to a text file in cpp?

I'm trying to write console data into a separate text file in cpp. Anybody help me with sample code.
There are various ways to do this. You could redirect it from the command line with programname > out.txt. Or you could use freopen("out.txt","w",stdout); at the start of your program.
If you want to write from your own process, I'd suggest a simple print method
void print(const string str, ostream & output)
{
output << str;
}
Then you can call
print("Print this", cout);
for console output, or
ofstream filestream("filename.out");
print("Print this", filestream);
to write into a file "filename.out". Of course you gain most, if print is a class method that outputs all the object's specific information you need and this way you can direct the output easily to different streams.
If you want to create a child process and redirect its output you could do something like this:
FILE* filePtr = popen("mycmd");
FILE* outputPtr = fopen("myfile.txt");
if(filePtr && outputPtr) {
char tmp;
while((tmp = getc(filePtr)) != EOF)
putc(tmp, outputPtr);
pclose(filePtr);
fclose(outputPtr);
}
bbtrb wrote:
void print(const string str, ostream &
output) {
output << str; }
Better than this is of course
ostream& output(ostream& out, string str) {out << str; return out;}
so that you can even have the manipulated output stream returned by the function.
smerrimans answer should help you out.
There is also the option to implement your own streambuf and use it with std::cout and std::cerr to store printouts to file instead of printing to console. I did that a while ago to redirect printouts to some sort of rotating logs with timestamps.
You will need to read up a little bit on how it works and this book helped me get it right.
If that's not what you're after it is a bit of overkill though.
Create file -> redirect input into file
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
int main()
{
std::string file_name;
std::string str;
std::cout << "Add file name:";
std::cin >> file_name;
std::cout << "Open file:" << file_name << std::endl;
std::ofstream oFile(file_name);
if (!oFile) {
std::cout << "ERROR: we can't open file:" << file_name << std::endl;
return 1;
}
else {
std::cout << "File is open: " << oFile.is_open() << std::endl;
}
std::cout << "Enter you sentence into file:\n";
getline(std::cin >> std::ws, str);
oFile << str;
oFile.close();
return 0;
}