Concatenate multiple chars - c++

Question

I m reading a file and I would like to extract all of its contents and store them into a single char in C++. I know it can be done with strings however I cannot use strings and need to resort to char instead. I can I concatenate multiple chars to one char variable?
Here is what I've tried so far:
string str = "";
ifstream file("c:/path.....");
while (file.good())
{
str += file.get();
}
const char* content = str.c_str();
printf("%c", *content);
but this just gave me the first letter of the file and that's it.
If also tried:
ifstream file("c:/path.....");
char c = ' ';
char result[100];
while (file.good())
{
c= file.get();
strcat(result,c);
}
but this gave me runtime errors all the time.

Answer 1

For the second try you gave in your question (which I guess from your other hints, is what you finally want), you can try the following as a quick fix:
ifstream file("c:/path.....");
char c[2] = { 0, 0 };
char result[100] = { 0 };
for (int i = 0; file && (i < 99); ++i)
{
c[0] = file.get();
strcat(result,c);
}
Since using strcat() might not be very efficient for this use case, I think a better implementation would directly write to the result buffer:
ifstream file("c:/path.....");
char result[100] = { 0 };
for (int i = 0; file && (i < 99); ++i)
{
result[i] = file.get();
}

Answer 2

In your first code block:
const char* content = str.c_str();
printf("%c", *content);
prints only the first character of the string because *contents dereferences the
pointer to the (first character of) the string, and %c is the printf-format for
a single character. You should replace that by
printf("%s", content);
to print the entire string. Or just use
std::cout << str;

Answer 3

Maybe something like that :
char result[100];
int i = 0;
while (file.good())
{
c= file.get();
if(i<100)
result[i++]=c;
}
result[i]='\0';
There a lot of things to improve in this solution (what would you do if there more then 99 chars in your file, file.good() not the best option for loop condition, and so on...). Also it is much better to use strings.I don't know exactly why you can't use them, but just in case you change your mind you can read your file like that :
std::string line;
while ( getline(stream, line)) {
process(line);
}

Answer 4

You can create std::strings of your characters and concatenate them:
char c1 = 'a';
char c2 = 'b';
std::string concatted = std::string(1, c1) + std::string(1, c2);
This works because of the fill std::string constructor, see the reference.

Answer 5

Obviously, you are new to the c++ or at least you're using some strange terminology.
First of all, I advice you to read some c++ literature for beginners (you can find list of it on stackoverflow). Then you will understand all the conceptions of strings in c++.
Second, use this code to read file content and store it in a char*.
FILE *f = fopen("path to file", "r");
fseek(f, 0, SEEK_END);
long fsize = ftell(f);
fseek(f, 0, SEEK_SET);
char *content = new char[fsize + 1];
fread(content, fsize, 1, f);
fclose(f);
content[fsize] = 0;
cout << "{" << content <<"}";
delete content;