Question

I’m writing on c++ in VS2010 Windows 7. I try to read file of size 64 bytes. Here’s the code:

    BYTE* MyReadFile(FILE *f)
{
    size_t result;
    BYTE *buffer;
    long lSize;
    if (f == NULL) 
    {
        fputs ("File error", stderr); 
        exit (1);
    }

    fseek (f, 0, SEEK_END);
    lSize = ftell (f);
    rewind (f);

    //buffer = (BYTE*) malloc (sizeof(char)*lSize);
    buffer = new BYTE[lSize];
    if (buffer == NULL) 
    {
        fputs ("Memory error", stderr); 
        exit (2);
    }

    result = fread (buffer, 1, lSize, f);
    if (result != lSize) 
    {
        fputs ("Reading error",stderr); 
        exit (3);
    }

    fclose (f);
    return buffer;
}

When I get file size it is 64, but when I allocate memory for it with new BYTE[lSize] I get 80 bytes of space and thus strange sequence ээээ««««««««оюою is added to the end of buffer. Can you please tell me how to handle this?

Answer 1

There is an important difference between the number of bytes you have allocated, and the number of bytes that you see.

If lsize is 64, you have indeed allocated yourself 64 bytes. This does not mean that behind the screen the C++ run time will have asked exactly 64 bytes to Windows. In practice memory managers ask slightly more memory so they are able to do their own homework. Often these extra bytes are allocated BEFORE the pointer you get back from new/malloc so you will never see them.

However, that is not your problem. The problem is that you read 64 bytes from file using fread. There is no way that fread knows what kind of data you are reading. It could be a struct, a char buffer, a set of doubles, … It just reads these bytes for you.

This means that if the file contains the characters “ABC” you will get exactly “ABC” back. BUT, in C, strings should be nul-terminated, so if you pass this buffer to printf, it will continue to scan memory until it finds a nul-character.

So, to solve your problem, allocate 1 byte more, and set the last byte to the nul character, like this:

buffer = new BYTE[lSize+1]; 
buffer[lSize] = '\0';