Why am I getting a conversion function error? - c++

Question

I have to read in an external file called text.txt. The file could contain a lot of data (and def > 83 chars) and I want to ignore the spaces. Then I need to get the total amount of chars in the file (not incl. spaces). I have to use strlen. I am getting a conversion type error which is confusing because I thought strlen returns an int. The error is on strlen(inputString) and more specifically on (inputString).
int main() {
fstream inFile;
string inputString;
inFile.open("text.txt", ios::in);
if (inFile) {
getline(inFile, inputString, ' ');
while (inFile)
{
int tempStringLength = strlen(inputString);
int total = 0;
total += tempStringLength;
}
}
else
cerr << "Unable to open file text.txt";
exit(1);
return 0;
}
I expect the total to be the total # of chars in the file.

Answer 1

The strlen function returns a size_t result which is usually equivalent to unsigned int on your platform.
Also, I haven't tried your code but it reads like an infinite loop. You might want to rearrange it like the following:
int main() {
fstream inFile;
string inputString;
inFile.open("text.txt", ios::in);
unsigned int total = 0;
if (inFile) {
while (inFile)
{
getline(inFile, inputString, ' ');
unsigned int tempStringLength =inputString.length();
total += tempStringLength;
//Or maybe combine the two previous statements into:
//total += inputString.length();
}
}
else
cerr << "Unable to open file text.txt";
exit(1);
return 0;
}
P.S.: Also, strlen expects a char[] as input. I've changed that to be string.length() instead.