I found this question answered for Python, Java, Linux script, but not C++:
I'd like to write all outputs of my C++ program to both the terminal and an output file. Using something like this:
int main ()
{
freopen ("myfile.txt","w",stdout);
cout<< "Let's try this";
fclose (stdout);
return 0;
}
outputs it to only the output file named "myfile.txt", and prevents it from showing on the terminal. How can I make it output to both simultaneously? I use visual studio 2010 express (if that would make any difference).
Thanks in advance!
Possible solution: use a static stream cout-like object to write both to cout and a file.
Rough example:
struct LogStream
{
template<typename T> LogStream& operator<<(const T& mValue)
{
std::cout << mValue;
someLogStream << mValue;
}
};
inline LogStream& lo() { static LogStream l; return l; }
int main()
{
lo() << "hello!";
return 0;
}
You will probably need to explicitly handle stream manipulators, though.
Here is my library implementation.
There is no built in way to do this in one step. You have to write the data to a file and then write the data out on screen in two steps.
You can write a function that takes in the data and the filename and does this for you, to save you time, some sort of logging function.
I have a method to do this, and it is based on a subscriber model.
In this model all your logging goes to a "logging" manager and you then have "subscribers" that decide what to do with the messages. Messages have topics (for me a number) and loggers subscribe to one or more topic.
For your purpose, you create 2 subscribers, one that outputs to the file and one that outputs to the console.
In the logic of your code you simply output the message, and at this level not need to know what is going to be done with it. In my model though you can check first if there are any "listeners" as this is considered cheaper than constructing and outputting messages that will only end up in /dev/null (well you know what I mean).
One way to do this would be to write a small wrapper to do this, for example:
class DoubleOutput
{
public:
// Open the file in the constructor or any other method
DoubleOutput(const std::string &filename);
// ...
// Write to both the file and the stream here
template <typename T>
friend DoubleOutput & operator<<(const T& file);
// ...
private:
FILE *file;
}
To have a class instead of a function makes you use the RAII idiom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_acquisition_is_initialization)
To use it:
DoubleOutput mystream("myfile");
mystream << "Hello World";
Related
I have made a pretty big program which prints very much information to the screen all the time.
The thing is that I can't be there all the time to read and eventually spot errors. So I came up with the idea to write everything that is printed by cout to a file.
The problem is that, how I already wrote, there are plenty "cout's". Working through the whole code and replacing every cout by a custom function would be very annoying.
Is there a way I how I can "hook" cout to be redirected to a custom function of mine?
You can provide a custom stream buffer via the rdbuf method. Here's an example that redirects cout to a file:
std::ofstream ofs("output");
std::cout.rdbuf(ofs.rdbuf());
You can redirect standard output directly to to file using command line with output redirection
fileneame.exe > log.txt
or
./filename > log.txt
Else use some RAII, something like following:
class Logger
{
std::ofstream filehandle;
std::ostream& myStream;
std::streambuf* mySavedStreambuf;
public:
Logger( std::ostream& oldStream, std::string const& filename)
: filehandle(filename)
, myStream(oldStream)
, mySavedStreambuf(oldStream.rdbuf())
{
oldStream.rdbuf(filehandle.rdbuf());
}
~Logger()
{
myStream.rdbuf(mySavedStreambuf);
}
};
And then in your intilization/main routine do something like:
int main()
{
{
Logger temp( std::cout, "log.txt" );
// call funcs that has std::cout, all outputs will be in log.txt
}// temp goes out of scope, std::cout restored.
// Call funcs that has std::cout, now all outputs on standard ouput.
}
I've created an fstream object to write info to files.
I write strings to the new file like
fStreamObject << "New message.\n";
because I want each << to print a string to the next line.
I want to be able to set a property and make a call like
fstreamObject << "New message.";
which will write the string to the next line.
Are there flags/settings for fstream objects that allows this to be done?
I've seen the different file modes (i.e. ofstream::in, ofstream::out, etc.), but I couldn't find one that auto writes to a new line. Also, I'm not looking to write my own solution. I want to be able to use a built in feature.
No, there are no readily configurable capabilities of that sort within the standard streams.
You may have to subclass the stream type and fiddle with operator<< to get this to work the way you want, or do it with a helper function of some description:
fstreamObject << nl("New message.");
(but that's hardly easier than just having the \n in there (for a string, anyway).
It depends on what you mean by "setting the stream". If we consider this to be fairly broad then the answer happens to be "yes"!
Here is how:
Create a stream buffer which inserts a newline every time it is flushed, i.e., when sync() is called. Otherwise it just forwards characters.
Change the file stream's stream buffer to use this stream buffer filtering to the file stream's stream buffer.
Set the flag std::ios_base::unitbuf which causes a flush after every [properly written] output operation.
Here are is the example code to do just that:
#include <iostream>
class newlinebuf
: public std::streambuf {
std::ostream* stream;
std::streambuf* sbuf;
int overflow(int c) { return this->sbuf->sputc(c); }
int sync() {
return (this->sbuf->sputc('\n') == std::char_traits::eof()
|| this->sbuf->pubsync() == -1)? -1: 0;
}
public:
newlinebuf(std::ostream& stream)
: stream(&stream)
, sbuf(stream.rdbuf(this)) {
stream << std::unitbuf;
}
~newlinebuf() { this->stream->rdbuf(this->sbuf); }
};
int main() {
newlinebuf sbuf(std::cout);
std::cout << "hello" << "world";
}
Although this approach work, I would recommend against using it! On problem is that all composite output operators, i.e., those using multiple output operators to do their work, will cause multiple newlines. I'm not aware of anything which can be done to prevent this behavior. There isn't anything in the standard library which enables just configuring the stream to do this: you'll need to insert the newline somehow.
No, the C++ streams do not allow that.
There is no way to decide where one insertion stops and the next starts.
For example for custom types, their stream-inserters are often implemented as calls to other stream-inserters and member-functions.
The only things you can do, is write your own class, which delegates to a stream of your choosing, and does that.
That's of strictly limited utiliy though.
struct alwaysenter {
std::ostream& o;
template<class X> alwaysenter& operator<<(X&& x) {
o<<std::forward<X>(x);
return *this;
}
};
I have a c++ program that prints to the screen using std::cout.
Sometimes I need to run it as a service. Is there any way of seeing the cout outputs when it's running as a Windows service?
Redirecting the output to a file or some sort of debugging program would be ideal.
Obviously I could replace the cout with a function that writes to a file, and that's probably what I'll do, but I'm curious to know if there are other solutions.
There's basically infinite options. The first few that come to mind:
Pass around an ostream reference
You could pass around an std::ostream reference:
void someFunc(std::ostream& out) {
//someFunc doesn't need to know whether out is a file, cout, or whatever
out << "hello world" << std::endl;
}
Replace cout underlying buffer with a file
Example from cplusplus.com:
streambuf *psbuf, *backup;
ofstream filestr;
filestr.open ("test.txt");
backup = cout.rdbuf(); // back up cout's streambuf
psbuf = filestr.rdbuf(); // get file's streambuf
cout.rdbuf(psbuf); // assign streambuf to cout
cout << "This is written to the file";
There's a 1-liner with freopen, but I have a creeping feeling (and this seems to reenforce it in the comments) that it's undefined behavior since stdin and cout can be un-synchronized.
freopen("/path/to/file", "r", stdout);
//cout is now writing to path/to/file
A logging library
Not sure of a good one of the top of my head, but you could go full out and use some type of logging library. (There's also Windows events, though depending on what you're outputting, that might not make sense.)
Piping
I doubt this is possible with a Windows service, but if it is, there's always the classic redirection:
blah.exe > C:\path\file
The easy solution is SetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE, your_new_handle).
You could do something like this:
class MyTerminal {
std::stringstream terminalText;
}
class MyWindow {
public:
void OnUpdate();
protected:
CTextbox m_textbox;
MyTerminal m_terminal;
}
void MyWindow::OnUpdate()
{
m_textBox.setText(m_terminal.terminalText.str());
m_terminal.terminalText.str(std::string());
}
In my application, I want to redirect the output that would normally go to the stdout stream to a function I define. I read that you can redirect stdio to a file, so why not to a function?
For example:
void MyHandler( const char* data );
//<<Magical redirection code>>
printf( "test" );
std::cout << "test" << std::endl;
//MyHandler should have been called with "test" twice, at this point
How can I achieve this / similar behaviour?
#Konrad Rudolph is right, you can totally do this, easily, at least for cout/cerr/clog. You don't even need your own streambuf implementation, just use an ostringstream.
// Redirect cout.
streambuf* oldCoutStreamBuf = cout.rdbuf();
ostringstream strCout;
cout.rdbuf( strCout.rdbuf() );
// This goes to the string stream.
cout << "Hello, World!" << endl;
// Restore old cout.
cout.rdbuf( oldCoutStreamBuf );
// Will output our Hello World! from above.
cout << strCout.str();
Same thing works for cerr and clog, but in my experience that will NOT work for stdout/stderr in general, so printf won't output there. cout goes to stdout, but redirecting cout will not redirect all stdout. At least, that was my experience.
If the amount of data is expected to be small, the freopen/setbuf thing works fine. I ended up doing the fancier dup/dup2 thing redirecting to a pipe.
Update: I wrote a blog post showing the dup2 method I ended up using, which you can read here. It's written for OS X, but might work in other Unix flavors. I seriously doubt it would work in Windows. Cocoa version of the same thing here.
Invoking a callback function whenever something’s written to the underlying standard output stream is hard: it requires overriding low-level, system-specific functions (on POSIX systems, it would require at least overriding write, and the way this is called might depend on the standard library implementation, so it might be different between e.g. glibc and musl).
But depending on what exactly you’re after you can solve this in C++ without resorting to low-level OS specific functions, by manipulating the C++ stream buffers directly.
For this you need to create your own std::streambuf implementation, i.e. your own stream buffer.
Once you have that, you can redirect the std::cout stream by switching the buffer:
auto buf = callback_streambuf(MyHandler);
auto pold_buffer = std::cout.rdbuf(&buf);
std::cout << "Hello" << std::cout;
// Restore original buffer:
std::cout.rdbuf(pold_buffer);
However, what this implementation won’t do is call your callback function exactly twice. Instead, the number of calls will depend on several factors, but it generally will not depend on the number of stream insertions (<<), and there is no way around that!
For the specific example above, the callback is called once, with the data "Hello\n".
The following minimal implementation illustrates how to get a streambuf to call your handler:
class callback_streambuf : public std::streambuf {
public:
callback_streambuf(std::function<void(char const*, std::streamsize)> callback) : callback(callback) {}
protected:
std::streamsize xsputn(char_type const* s, std::streamsize count) {
callback(s, count);
return count;
}
private:
std::function<void(char const*, std::streamsize)> callback;
};
This implementation has several caveats. For instance, it does the wrong thing when attempts are made to use it as an input stream. It doesn’t override overflow (since I don’t think this is ever called, although I find conflicting information about this on the internet; at any rate, adding overflow would be trivial). I didn’t implement synchronisation, so the callback will be called concurrently from multiple threads. Furthermore, there is no error handling, since the callback does not return a success status. I also had to change the signature of the callback to
void MyHandler(char const* data, std::streamsize count);
The second parameter is required since data isn’t a string, it’s a raw char buffer, so there is no way to determine its length intrinsically, and MyHandler can do nothing useful with the data without knowing its length.
Answer: Yes you can, via a dup. freopen will only reopen stdout to a file, as you talked about.
Check out How to buffer stdout in memory and write it from a dedicated thread
It's possible to disable stdin/stdout by dereferencing its pointer:
FILE fp_old = *stdout; // preserve the original stdout
*stdout = *fopen("/dev/null","w"); // redirect stdout to null
HObject m_ObjPOS = NewLibraryObject(); // call some library which prints unwanted stdout
*stdout=fp_old; // restore stdout
The std::cout object has a fixed meaning, and that is to output to the standard out stream. The user of your program gets to control where standard out is connected to, not you. What you can do is decide whether you wish to write to a file, to standard out or to any other output stream. So in your code you switch what stream you write to.
Again, the point of writing to the standard out stream is to give the user a flexibility in choosing where the output goes to. You're not supposed to redirect standard out; this is something the user is supposed to have the freedom to do.
Another thing is that you shouldn't mix C IO and C++ IO in a C++ program. Choose which IO library you wish to work with and stick to it.
That said, you can in C++ quite elegantly switch streams for a function to take input from by templating the handler function on the template parameters of std::basic_istream<>. Then the function will read its input from the input stream independently of the real kind of stream it's working with. Here's an example:
#include<iostream>
#include<fstream>
#include<string>
template<class Ch, class Tr>
void dodge_this(std::basic_istream<Ch, Tr>& in)
{
// in is an input stream. read from it as you read from std::cin.
}
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
if( std::string(argv[1]) == "cin" ) {
dodge_this(std::cin);
} else if( std::string(argv[1]) == "file" ) {
std::ifstream file("input.txt");
dodge_this(file);
} else {
dodge_this(dev_null_stream); // i just made that up. you get the idea.
}
}
Another option is to place your handler class calls into the inherited streambuf class. I had a requirement to redirect cout to a Win GUI edit control in a dialog box that may be of some use. Here is the class code:
//-------------------------------- DlgStringbuf Definition -----------------------
class DlgStringbuf : public std::stringbuf
{
public:
DlgStringbuf(void) : _hwndDlg(NULL), _editControlID(0), _accum(""), _lineNum(0) {}
void SetDlg(HWND dlg, int editControlID)
{ _hwndDlg = dlg; _editControlID = editControlID; }
void Clear(void)
{ _accum.clear(); _lineNum = 0; }
protected:
virtual std::streamsize xsputn(const char* s, std::streamsize num)
{
std::mutex m;
std::lock_guard<std::mutex> lg(m);
// Prepend with the line number
std::string str(s, (const uint32_t)num);
str = std::to_string(_lineNum) + ": " + str + "\r\n";
// Accumulate the latest text to the front
_accum = str + _accum;
// Write to the Win32 dialog edit control.
if(_hwndDlg != NULL)
SetDlgItemTextW(_hwndDlg, _editControlID, (LPCWSTR)(std::wstring(_accum.begin(), _accum.end())).c_str());
_lineNum++;
return(num);
}//end xsputn.
private:
std::string _accum;
HWND _hwndDlg;
int _editControlID;
uint32_t _lineNum;
};//end DlgStringbuf.
//-------------------------------- DlgStream Definition ------------------------------
class DlgStream : public std::ostream
{
public:
DlgStream(void) : std::ostream(&_sbuff) {}
void SetDlg(HWND dlg, int editControlID)
{ _sbuff.SetDlg(dlg, editControlID); }
void Clear(void)
{ _sbuff.Clear(); }
private:
DlgStringbuf _sbuff;
};
...and in the WinMain, someplace after the dialog box and its edit control is created:
// Redirect all cout usage to the activity dlg box.
// Save output buffer of the stream - use unique pointer with deleter that ensures to restore
// the original output buffer at the end of the program.
auto del = [&](streambuf* p) { cout.rdbuf(p); };
unique_ptr<streambuf, decltype(del)> origBuffer(cout.rdbuf(), del);
// Redirect the output to the dlg stream.
_dlgStream.SetDlg(hwndActivityDlg, IDC_EDIT_ACTIVITY);
_dlgStream.copyfmt(cout);
cout.rdbuf(_dlgStream.rdbuf());
cout << "this is from cout";
You can use sprintf to write to a character array and then read the value:
char buf[1024];
sprintf(buf, "test");
MyHandler(buf);
there are also snprintf and a few others depending on platform
So I have a C++ program, that normally when it executes writes out things to a log file. This is done using an fstream. However, now I want to include functionality to turn the logging off. Essentially, my code looks like this:
bool isLogging;
fstream* logFilePtr;
throughout my code, there are a bunch of statements like:
(*logFilePtr) << " Kernel call time in seconds: " << kTime << endl;
...
Now, if the "isLogging" is true, I don't want these to print. I could just go surround them with a bunch of if statements, but I'd prefer something cleaner than that. I thought there was some way to take a C++ stream and redirect it to point to "nothing" so that when the << operator is used, nothing will print.
Does anyone know how to redirect the stream, or have any other ideas on how to handle this in an elegant way?
Thanks,
Colin
You could wrap it up in a class.
class Log {
Log (fstream &s) : stream(s), enabled(false) { }
void Enable () { enabled = true; }
void Disable () { enabled = false; }
template<class T>
Log &operator<< (T const& rhs) {
if (enabled) stream << rhs;
return *this;
}
private:
fstream &stream;
bool enabled;
};
this isn't tested .. but the basic idea should be there.
Take a look at rdbuf member function. You can create a discarding stream buffer and associate it with your stream.
struct nullbuf: std::streambuf
{
int overflow(int c) { return traits_type::not_eof(c); }
};
std::iostream doesn't allow OS-level redirection, however, you can share std::streambufs between std::iostreams:
int main() {
// redirect stdout to stderr:
std::streambuf * const oldstdout = std::cout.rdbuf();
std::cout.rdbuf( std::cerr.rdbuf() );
// test
std::cout << "Hello ";
std::cerr << "World" << std::endl;
// re-set, so streambufs are properly deleted:
std::cout.rdbuf( oldstdout );
// test
std::cout << "Hello ";
std::cerr << "World" << std::endl;
return 0;
}
This way, you can redirect logging to somewhere else (e.g. "/dev/null" :), or, if you follow avakar's answer, use nullbuf.
platform? if you are under unix you can write the file to /dev/null
I use POCO library's logging feature. It supports configuring channels - console, file, both. Configuring format of output and logging levels (trace, debug, error etc). I then surround the logging functionality with functions such as
inline void logError(const std::string & str)
{
#ifdef COMPILE_ERROR_LOGGING
g_pMyPocoLogger->error(str);
#endif
}
You can choose not to use the library but I still recommend surrounding your logging with a wrapper.
std::ostream& Debug(int level) {
std::clog.clear(levell <= shown_level ? std::ios_base::goodbit: std::ios_base::badbit);
return std::clog;
}
From comp.lang.c++.
Under "other ideas on how to handle this":
Use the state pattern to eliminate the need for the if checks around all code.
Use the policy pattern (compile time strategy pattern) with a Logging policy object.