Question

I’m trying to read use fread to read in values from an external file in C++. The values are stored as uint16’s, which does not seem to exist in C++. I did some googling and found people using typedef to make their own uint16, but I’m also wondering if I could just use fread(ptr, uint8, 2, file) to read two uint8’s to be stored in ptr.

Does anyone have any insight to the best way of going about this?

Answer 1

You probably want:

fread(ptr, sizeof(uint8), 2, file)

Seems OK to me, fread(ptr, 1, 2, file) is even better. Or fread(ptr, sizeof(uint16_t), 1, file).

I assume that ptr is a pointer pointing to the location where you want to store your data, not the variable itself (if so – use &ptr).

Reading two bytes at a time though may become a performance issue, consider reading into a memory buffer, and then parsing it.