Question

After the program reads the file, gets characters from the file, and finishes, the user is asked if they want another file read or not. If the user say yes, then the program asks for the file name, but then automatically says the file could not be opened and exits the loop. Please help me.

Here is the code:

do //do while opening the source file fails
      {
         cout << "Enter filename of source file: ";
         cin.getline (filename,51);
         sourceFile.open(filename);  //opens the file with given filename
         if (sourceFile.fail())
            cout << "File could not be opened" << endl;  //error if can't open
         sourceFile.clear();
      } 
      while (sourceFile.fail());  //exits if source file doesn't fail

Answer 1

This test:

while (sourceFile.fail())

will never be true because just before you get there you call:

sourceFile.clear()

which will clear any problem bits in the iostate for the stream.

I think you just want to get rid of the call to clear().