fstream EOF unexpectedly throwing exception - c++

Question

My question is very similar to a previous one. I want to open and read a file. I want exceptions thrown if the file can't be opened, but I don't want exceptions thrown on EOF. fstreams seem to give you independent control over whether exceptions are thrown on EOF, on failures, and on other bad things, but it appears that EOF tends to also get mapped to the bad and/or fail exceptions.
Here's a stripped-down example of what I was trying to do. The function f() is supposed to return true if a file contains a certain word, false if it doesn't, and throw an exception if (say) the file doesn't exist.
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
bool f(const char *file)
{
ifstream ifs;
string word;
ifs.exceptions(ifstream::failbit | ifstream::badbit);
ifs.open(file);
while(ifs >> word) {
if(word == "foo") return true;
}
return false;
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
try {
bool r = f(argv[1]);
cout << "f returned " << r << endl;
} catch(...) {
cerr << "exception" << endl;
}
}
But it doesn't work, because basic fstream reading using operator>> is evidently one of the operations for which EOF sets the bad or the fail bit. If the file exists and does not contain "foo" the function does not return false as desired, but rather throws an exception.

Answer 1

The std::ios_base::failbit flag is also set when there's an attempted extraction when the file has reached the end, something which the behavior of the stream's boolean operator allows. You should set up an extra try-catch block in f() and rethrow the exception if it doesn't correspond with the end of file condition:
std::ifstream ifs;
std::string word;
ifs.exceptions(std::ifstream::failbit | std::ifstream::badbit);
try {
ifs.open(file);
while (ifs >> word) {
if (word == "foo") return true;
}
}
catch (std::ios_base::failure&) {
if (!ifs.eof())
throw;
}
return false;

Answer 2

If the goal is to throw an exception only in case of a problem when opening the file, why not write:
bool f(const char *file)
{
ifstream ifs;
string word;
ifs.open(file);
if (ifs.fail()) // throw only when needed
throw std::exception("Cannot open file !"); // more accurate exception
while (ifs >> word) {
if (word == "foo") return true;
}
return false;
}
You could of course set :
ifs.exceptions(ifstream::badbit);
before or after the the open, to throw an exception in case something really bad would happen during the reading.

Answer 3

basic_ios::operator bool() checks fail(), not !good(). Your loop tries to read one more word after EOF is reached. operator>>(stream&, string&) sets failbit if no characters were extracted. That's why you always exit with an exception.
It's hard to avoid that though. The stream reaches EOF state not when the last character is read, but when an attempt is made to read past the last character. If that happens in the middle of a word, then failbit is not set. If it happens in the beginning (e.g. if the input has trailing whitespace), then failbit is set. You can't really reliably end up in eof() && !fail() state.