Question

I’m making a shift cipher that reads in text from a file and decodes it. The decryption works fine howver i can’t figure out how to find the length of the file without hardcoding it into the size of the char array. It also only reads in one line, anything with a newline in corrupts.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, i’ve left out the main block of code as that deals with the array after it has been read in and seemed a bit long and irrelevant.

string fileName;
cout << "Please enter the locations of your encrypted text (e.g ""encryptedText.txt""): ";
getline( cin, fileName );
char encryptedMessage[446]; //How do i read in the file length and declare the array size as a variable instead of [446]?
char decryptedMessage[446];

ifstream in(fileName);
if(in.get(encryptedMessage, 446))
{
  [my decrypting code]
}
else
{
cout << "Couldn't successfully read file.\n";
}
system("pause");

Answer 1

You can use seekg to get the size of an entire file:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
using namespace std;

int main () {
  long begin_byte, end_byte;
  ifstream in("example.txt");
  begin_byte = in.tellg();
  in.seekg (0, ios::end);
  end_byte = in.tellg();
  int total_bytes = end_byte - begin_byte;
  in.seekg(0, ios::begin);
  char *message = new char[total_bytes + 1];
  int index = 0;
  while (in) {
    message[index++] = in.get();
  }
  in.close();
  cout << "message is: " << message << endl;
  delete [] message;
  return 0;
}

You can read more about seekg, tellg and files in c++ as a whole here.

However a better solution then using char * is using a std:string and calling push_back on it while in has not ended:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main () {
  ifstream in("example.txt");
  string message;
  while (in) {
    message.push_back(in.get());
  }
  in.close();
  cout << "message is: " << message << endl;
  return 0;
}