Question

I’m having trouble reading a file in UTF8 encoding into a wchar_t buffer as I don’t know the file size in advance.

Does anyone know how I can read the whole file in a buffer?

I imagine I’d have to keep a wchar_t * (pointer) and resize it as I read. However that sounds very scary as I haven’t ever resized pointers before.

I’m doing Windows C++ programming with Microsoft Visual Studio.

Answer 1

Have you considered using a vector?

#include <vector>
#include <fstream>
#include <iterator>

:::

std::wifstream in(file_name);

//Will automatically reallocate to the require size
std::vector<wchar_t> store {
    std::istream_iterator<wchar_t, wchar_t>(in),
    std::istream_iterator<wchar_t, wchar_t>()};

//to access wchar_t* you can call data();
my_func(store.data());