Question

I am currently trying to read a file, put extra backward slash () if it finds a backward slash, and write it to another file. The problem is, there are weird characters being printed inside the path.txt. I suspect that, the space characters from the file logdata is the root of this problem. Need advice how to solve this.

Here is the code:

// read a file
char str[256];
fstream file_op("C:\\logdata",ios::in);
file_op >> str;
file_op.close();

// finds the slash, and add additional slash
char newPath[MAX_PATH];
int newCount = 0;
for(int i=0; i < strlen(str); i++)
{
 if(str[i] == '\\')
   {
    newPath[newCount++] = str[i];
   }
   newPath[newCount++] = str[i];
}


// write it to a different file
ofstream out("c:\\path.txt", ios::out | ios::binary);
out.write(newPath, strlen(newPath));
out.close();

Answer 1

Every char string in C has to end with character \0. It is an indicator that the string ends right there.

Your newPath array, after iterating through your for-loop is not correctly ended. It probably ends somewhere later, where \0 appears by accident in memory.

Try doing the following right after exiting the for-loop:

newPath[newCount]=0;

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A safer way for using strings in C++, is to use std::string class over plain char arrays.