File Input in C++ - c++

Question

I've been searching the internet for a while, but all I can find for file input in C++ is when you know the filename.
I'm trying to write a program to perform an addition of 2 numbers that are greater than 0 from a file, but without using scanf or cin. I want to load the file into memory, but all of the code I can find in regards to this situation requires knowledge of the filename. The file is formatted with 2 integers on a single line, separated by a space, and there are multiple lines of integers. The program will output the sum of the two numbers. I can easily do this with scanf, but if I were given a massive file, I would want to load it into memory (save mapping for later).
Loading the file into memory is giving me trouble, because I do not know the filename, nor how to find out, unless the user inputs the name of the file (not going to happen). I want the program to be executed like so, but using the most raw, and basic forms of C++ IO:
./myprog < boatloadofnumbers
How would I start my program to take the whole "boatloadofnumbers" as a file, so I can use more basic functions like read()? (also, what is the above method called? passing input?)
int main(){
int a,b;
while (scanf("%i,%i",&a,&b)>-1){
printf("%i\n",(a+b));
} //endwhile
return 0;
} //endmain

Answer 1

When the program is called as you state, then the content of boatloadofnumbers can be read from std::cin.
This method is called input redirection and is done by the shell, not your program.
Wiht input redirection the shell usually buffers the content of the file. That's a quite fast way to stream a file a single time through a computation.

Answer 2

It's not entirely clear how you're going to read a file when you don't know the filename. Presumably you don't know the filename at compile-time. That's okay, you can get this from the command-line at runtime, like this:
./myprog boatloadofnumbers
Then your filename is in argv[1] and you can access it using a std::ifstream.
If you're being given the input directly on stdin via redirection (such as ./myprog < boatloadofnumbers) you don't need a filename at all, you can just use std::cin.
The following main() will deal with both of these situations:
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
if (argc == 2)
{
std::cerr << "Reading from file" << argv[1] << std::endl;
std::ifstream ifs(argv[1]);
if (ifs)
{
sum_lines(ifs);
}
else
{
std::cerr << "Could not read from " << argv[1] << std::endl;
}
}
else
{
std::cerr << "Reading from stdin" << std::endl;
sum_lines(std::cin);
}
}
A sample sum_lines() may look a bit like this:
void sum_lines(std::istream& is)
{
int first = 0, second = 0;
std::string line = "";
while (std::getline(is, line))
{
std::istringstream iss(line);
if (is >> first >> second)
{
std::cout << first << " + " << second << " = " << first + second << std::endl;
}
else
{
std::cerr << "Could not parse [" << line << "]" << std::endl;
}
}
}
This doesn't care from where the input comes, so you can easily inject a std::istringstream for unit-testing. Also, this doesn't read the whole file into memory, just one line at a time, so it should deal with averybigboatloadofnumbers.

Answer 3

With shell redirection, your program can read from the standard input, which may be desirable. However, it may also be desirable to read from a file. It's easy to support both:
cat data > ./prog
./prog < data
./prog -f data
The first two are similar, and the contents of the file data are available from the program's standard input; the third line simply passes a command-line argument. Here's how we support this:
#include <cstdio>
#include <cstring>
void process_input(std::FILE * fp)
{
char buf[4];
std::fread(buf, 4, 1, fp);
// ...
}
int main(int argc, char * argv[])
{
std::FILE * fp = stdin; // already open!
if (argc >= 3 && 0 == std::strcmp(argv[1]. "-f"))
{
fp = std::fopen(argv[2], "rb");
if (!fp)
{
std::fprintf(stderr, "Could not open file %s.\n", argv[2]);
return 1;
}
}
process_input(fp);
if (fp != stdin) { std::fclose(fp); }
}
Equivalently, you can achieve something similar with iostreams, though it's a bit more roundabout to have a nice, universal reference:
#include <fstream>
int main()
{
std::ifstream ifp;
if ( /* as before */ )
{
ifp.open(argv[2], std::ios::binary);
if (!ifp) { /* error and die */ }
}
std::ifstream & infile = ifp ? ifp : std::cin;
process_input(infile);
}