I wrote this binary reader after a tutorial on the internet. (I'm trying to find the link...)
The code reads the file byte by byte and the first 4 bytes are together the magic word. (Let's say MAGI!) My code looks like this:
std::ifstream in(fileName, std::ios::in | std::ios::binary);
char *magic = new char[4];
while( !in.eof() ){
// read the first 4 bytes
for (int i=0; i<4; i++){
in.get(magic[i]);
}
// compare it with the magic word "MAGI"
if (strcmp(magic, "MAGI") != 0){
std::cerr << "Something is wrong with the magic word: "
<< magic << ", couldn't read the file further! "
<< std::endl;
exit(1);
}
// read the rest ...
}
Now here comes the problem, when I open my file, I get this error output:
Something is wrong with the magic word: MAGI?, couldn't read the file further! So there is always one (mostly random) character after the word MAGI, like in this example the character ?!
I do think that it has something to do with how a string in C++ is stored and compared with each other. Am I right and how can I avoid this?
PS: this implementation is included in another program and works totally fine ... weird.
strcmp assumes that both strings are nul-terminated (end with a nul-character). When you want to compare strings which are not terminated, like in this case, you need to use strncmp and tell it how many characters to compare (4 in this case).
if (strncmp(magic, "MAGI", 4) != 0){
When you try to use strcmp to compare not null-terminated char arrays, it can't tell how long the arrays are (you can't tell the length of an array in C/C++ just by looking at the array itself - you need to know the length it was allocated with. The standard library is not exempt from this limitation). So it reads any data which happens to be stored in memory after the char array until it hits a 0-byte.
By the way: Note the comment to your question by Lightness Races in Orbit, which is unrelated to the issue you are having now, but which hints a different bug which might cause you some problems later on.
Related
When I read in information via fstream, it has ocurred twice in two different programs, that the input given to my program isn't stable, even if a given file doesn't change.
In my most recent program, which is concerned with audio-reading. I'm doing a simple check on the first four letters in the file. These letters are supposed to be RIFF, which they also are - I checked.
So, in order to check the format of a given binary file, I buffer the first four letters and see if they are equal to 'RIFF'.
char buffer[4];
std::ifstream in(fn,std::ios::binary);
in.read(buffer,4);
if(buffer!="RIFF"){//Always wrong atm
std::cout << "INVALID WAV FILE: " << buffer << std::endl;
}
When I first made the program, I recall this working properly. Now though, I get an error via my own cout:
INVALID WAV FILE: RIFFýfK
Does anyone have any idea as to what has gone wrong? Perhaps a way to make fstream more consistent?
You're reading 4 characters but not adding a zero terminator, furthermore your comparison is wrong since you're not comparing strings equality, you should rather do:
char buffer[5];
std::ifstream in(fn, std::ios::binary);
in.read(buffer, 4);
buffer[4] = '\0'; // Add a zero-terminator at the end
if (strcmp(buffer,"RIFF")) { // If buffer isn't {'R','I','F','F','\0'}..
std::cout << "INVALID WAV FILE: " << buffer << std::endl;
}
EDIT: Problem solved! Turns out Windows 7 wont let me read/ write to files without explicitly running as administrator. So if i run as admin it works fine, if i dont i get the weird results i explain below.
I've been trying to get a part of a larger program of mine to read a file.
Despite trying multiple methods(istream::getline, std::getline, using the >> operator etc) All of them return with either /0, blank or a random number/what ever i initialised the var with.
My first thought was that the file didn't exist or couldn't be opened, however the state flags .good, .bad and .eof all indicate no problems and the file im trying to read is certainly in the same directory as the debug .exe and contains data.
I'd most like to use istream::getline to read lines into a char array, however reading lines into a string array is possible too.
My current code looks like this:
void startup::load_settings(char filename[]) //master function for opening a file.
{
int i = 0; //count variable
int num = 0; //var containing all the lines we read.
char line[5];
ifstream settings_file (settings.inf);
if (settings_file.is_open());
{
while (settings_file.good())
{
settings_file.getline(line, 5);
cout << line;
}
}
return;
}
As said above, it compiles but just puts /0 into every element of the char array much like all the other methods i've tried.
Thanks for any help.
Firstly your code is not complete, what is settings.inf ?
Secondly most probably your reading everything fine, but the way you are printing is cumbersome
cout << line; where char line[5]; be sure that the last element of the array is \0.
You can do something like this.
line[4] = '\0' or you can manually print the values of each element in array in a loop.
Also you can try printing the character codes in hex for example. Because the values (character codes) in array might be not from the visible character range of ASCII symbols. You can do it like this for example :
cout << hex << (int)line[i]
Ok, just to be up front, this IS homework, but it isn't due for another week, and I'm not entirely sure the final details of the assignment. Long story short, without knowing what concepts he'll introduce in class, I decided to take a crack at the assignment, but I've run into a problem. Part of what I need to do for the homework is read individual characters from an input file, and then, given the character's position within its containing word, repeat the character across the screen. The problem I'm having is, the words in the text file are single words, each on a different line in the file. Since I'm not sure we'll get to use <string> for this assignment, I was wondering if there is any way to identify the end of the line without using <string>.
Right now, I'm using a simple ifstream fin; to pull the chars out. I just can't figure out how to get it to recognize the end of one word and the beginning of another. For the sake of including code, the following is all that I've got so far. I was hoping it would display some sort of endl character, but it just prints all the words out run together style.
ifstream fin;
char charIn;
fin.open("Animals.dat");
fin >> charIn;
while(!fin.eof()){
cout << charIn;
fin >> charIn;
}
A few things I forgot to include originally:
I must process each character as it is input (my loop to print it out needs to run before I read in the next char and increase my counter). Also, the length of the words in 'Animals.dat' vary which keeps me from being able to just set a number of iterations. We also haven't covered fin.get() or .getline() so those are off limits as well.
Honestly, I can't imagine this is impossible, but given the restraints, if it is, I'm not too upset. I mostly thought it was a fun problem to sit on for a while.
Why not use an array of chars? You can try it as follow:
#define MAX_WORD_NUM 20
#define MAX_STR_LEN 40 //I think 40 is big enough to hold one word.
char words[MAX_WROD_NUM][MAX_STR_LEN];
Then you can input a word to the words.
cin >> words[i];
The >> operator ignores whitespace, so you'll never get the newline character. You can use c-strings (arrays of characters) even if the <string> class is not allowed:
ifstream fin;
char animal[64];
fin.open("Animals.dat");
while(fin >> animal) {
cout << animal << endl;
}
When reading characters from a c-string (which is what animal is above), the last character is always 0, sometimes represented '\0' or NULL. This is what you check for when iterating over characters in a word. For example:
c = animal[0];
for(int i = 1; c != 0 && i < 64; i++)
{
// do something with c
c = animal[i];
}
I'm having a weird problem with the following function, which returns a string with all the characters in it after a certain point:
string after(int after, string word) {
char temp[word.size() - after];
cout << word.size() - after << endl; //output here is as expected
for(int a = 0; a < (word.size() - after); a++) {
cout << word[a + after]; //and so is this
temp[a] = word[a + after];
cout << temp[a]; //and this
}
cout << endl << temp << endl; //but output here does not always match what I want
string returnString = temp;
return returnString;
}
The thing is, when the returned string is 7 chars or less, it works just as expected. When the returned string is 8 chars or more, then it starts spewing nonsense at the end of the expected output. For example, the lines
cout << after(1, "12345678") << endl;
cout << after(1, "123456789") << endl;
gives an output of:
7
22334455667788
2345678
2345678
8
2233445566778899
23456789�,�D~
23456789�,�D~
What can I do to fix this error, and are there any default C++ functions that can do this for me?
Use the std::string::substr library function.
std::string s = "12345678";
std::cout << s.substr (1) << '\n'; // => 2345678
s = "123456789";
std::cout << s.substr (1) << '\n'; // 23456789
The behavior you're describing would be expected if you copy the characters into the string but forget to tack a null character at the end to terminate the string. Try adding a null character to the end after the loop, and make sure you allocate enough space (one more character) for the null character. Or, better, use the string constructor overload which accepts not just a char * but also a length.
Or, even better std::string::substr -- it will be easier and probably more efficient.
string after(int after, string word) {
return word.substr (after);
}
BTW, you don't need an after method, since exactly what you want already exists on the string class.
Now, to answer your specific question about why this only showed up on the 8th and later characters, it's important to understand how "C" strings work. A "C" string is a sequence of bytes which is terminated by a null (0) character. Library functions (like the string constructor you use to copy temp into a string instance which takes a char *) will start reading from the first character (temp[0]) and will keep reading until the end, where "the end" is the first null character, not the size of the memory allocation. For example, if temp is 6 characters long but you fill up all 6 characters, then a library function reading that string to "the end" will read the first 6 characters and then keep going (past the end of the allocated memory!) until it finds a null character or the program crashes (e.g. due to trying to access an invalid memory location).
Sometimes you may get lucky: if temp was 6 characters long and the first byte in memory after the end of your allocation happened to be a zero, then everything would work fine. If however the byte after the end of your allocation happened to be non-zero, then you'd see garbage characters. Although it's not random (often the same bytes will be there every time since they're filled by operations like previous method calls which are consistent from run to run of your program), but if you're accessing uninitialized memory there's no way of knowing what you'll find there. In a bounds checking environment (e.g. Java or C# or C++'s string class), an attempt to read beyond the bounds of an allocation will throw an exception. But "C" strings don't know where their end is, leaving them vulnerable to problems like the one you saw, or more nefarious problems like buffer overflows.
Finally, a logical follow-up question you'd probably ask: why exactly 8 bytes? Since you're trying to access memory that you didn't allocate and didn't initialize, whats in that RAM is what the previous user of that RAM left there. On 32-bit and 64-bit machines, memory is generally allocated in 4- or 8-byte chunks. So it's likely that the previous user of that memory location stored 8 bytes of zeroes there (e.g. one 64-bit integer zero) zeros there. But the next location in memory had something different left there by the previous user. Hence your garbage characters.
Moral of the story: when using "C" strings, be very careful about your null terminators and buffer lengths!
Your string temp is not NULL terminated. You requite temp[a] = '\0'; at the end of loop. Also you need to allocate word.size() - after + 1 chars so as to accomodate the NULL character.
You're not null-terminating your char array. C-style strings (i.e., char arrays) need to have a null character (i.e., '\0') at the end so functions using them know when to stop.
I think this is basically your after() function, modulo some fudging of indexes:
string after(int after, string word) {
return word.substring(after);
}
Edit: I'm trying to convert a text file into bytes. I'm not sure if the code is turning it into bytes or not. Here is the link to the header so you can see the as_bytes function.
link
#include "std_lib_facilities.h"
int main()
{
cout << "Enter input file name.\n";
string file;
cin >> file;
ifstream in(file.c_str(), ios::binary);
int i;
vector<int> bin;
while(in.read(as_bytes(i), sizeof(int)))
bin.push_back(i);
ofstream out(file.c_str(), ios::out);
for(int i = 0; i < bin.size(); ++i)
out << bin[i];
keep_window_open();
}
Note that now the out stream just outputs the contents of the vector. It doesn't use the write function or the binary mode. This converts the file to a large line of numbers - is this what I'm looking for?
Here is an example of the second code's file conversion:
that guy likes to eat lots of pie (not sure if this was exact text)
turns to
543518319544825700191924850016351970295432362115448292821701667182186922608417526375411952522351186935715718643976841768956006
The reason your first method didn't change the file is because all files are stored in the same way. The only "difference" between text files and binary files is that text files contain only bytes that can be shown as ASCII characters, while binary files* have a much more random variety and order of bytes. So you are reading bytes in as bytes and then outputting them as bytes again!
*I'm including Unicode text files as binary, since they can have multiple bytes to denote one character point, depending on the character point and the encoding used.
The second method is also fairly simple. You are reading in the bytes, as before, and storing them in integers (which are probably 4 bytes long). Then you are just printing out the integers as if they are integers, so you are seeing a string of numbers.
As for why your first method cut off some of the bytes, you're right in that it's probably some bug in your code. I thought it was more important to explain what the ideas are in this case, rather than debug some test code.