I/O in C++

October 7, 2008. Junaed Sattar

Stream I/O

a stream is a flow of bytes/characters/ints or any type of data

input streams: to the program output streams: from the program note I use plural

one program can have multiple I/O streams associated and vice-versa

Input/Output

Console based, no GUI

standard streams:

cin: standard input cout: standard output cerr: standard error

Extraction/Insertion
cout << Hello world!;
cout << The value of i is << i << endl; //endl puts a new line

cout << Please enter your name: ;

string name; cin >> name;

What are cin and cout?

Stream classes
Classes have methods, as we know

so does cin and cout some common to all I/O stream classes in C++ File I/O, binary/text mode I/O, console I/O

One example

cin inputs ints, chars, null-terminated strings, string objects

but terminates when encounters space (ascii character 32) workaround? use the get method

Snippet
char tData[100];
// This is a method in C++ istream classes for

Inputting i am oh so cool
cin.get gets the entire line just cin will get I

// inputting text
//including spaces cin.get( tData, 99 ); // or cin.get(tData,99,'\n');

space termination

Or,

Use the getline function

getline( cin, name );

File I/O

Reading from or writing to files on disk

ifstream and ofstream classes

dedicated for input and output respectively

or, use fstream

Example Files Program(filesdemo)

ofstream myofile;
myofile.open( sample.txt ); myofile << This is a sample line I'm writing\n;

myofile.close();
... ifstream myifile;

myifile.open( sample.txt );
string oneLine; getline( myifile, oneLine );

cout << oneLine;

myifile.close();

Read/Write to files (files1/2)

Similar to how we use cin and cout

remember, these are I/O streams too

myfile is a file stream object, then:

to write an int:

int i = 10; myfile << i;

to read an int:

int i; myfile >> i;

Binary files

As opposed to text files, they are unformatted as ascii.

text files stores everything as ascii text strings even numbers binary files do not

Example: consider outout of the program in the previous slide

Difference?

Example program

Accepts student ID (I input 1010) Accepts name (I input Junaed) Accepts CGPA (I input 4.5)

Save into two files, as text and binary

Storage

TEXT FILE

BINARY FILE

Binary files

Files by default are text

Different methods to write and read

requires casting (we'll see casting soon) different data format

If time permits, we'll revisit

Failures?

If open fails?

Check before use

if( !myifile ) { cerr << Cannot open file!; exit(1); }

End of file?

while( myifile.fail() ) { //do your operations here }

Random vs Sequential

Random access files

nonsequential, as a result faster access times, content must be suitable for random access

for example. not on network streams!

or console input

File heads

Access positions
one each for read and write

hence two methods:

seekg (as in get) for reading seekp (as in put) for writing ifstreams have seekg ofstreams have seekp

seeking

seekg( position, mode) //(same for seekp)

position is a long integer signed offset

mode can be

ios::beg: from the beginning ios::end from the end ios::cur from current position

telling

tellg and tellp

returns as long integer, the position of the get and put positions, respectively

example seeks
file.seekg( 20L, ios::beg );
file.seekp( -100L, ios::cur );

long pPosition = file.tellp();

long gPosition = file.tellg();