Question

It seems to be a general consensus that C arrays are bad and that using the smarter alternatives, like vectors or C++ strings is the way to go. No problem here.

Having said that, why does the read() member of ifstream input data to a char*…
The question is: can I input to a vector of bytes somehow using the STL alone?

A related bonus question: do you often check for ios::badbit and ios::failbit especially if you work with a dynamically allocated C string within that scope? Do you do deallocation of the C string in the catch()‘s?

Thank you for reading.

Answer 1

You can read directly into an allocated vector (I have no ability to compile this from here so there might be typos or transposed parameters etc…) but the idea is correct.

vector<char> data;
data.resize(100);

// Read 100 characters into the storage of data
thing.read(&data[0], 100);