Question

The code below will print all of the text from the sample text file I’m using except for the last little snippet of it. I think this has something to do with the eof or the byte size I’m using not working as I expect.

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char* argv[]){
int length;
char* buffer;

//get file stream and open local file.
ifstream stream;
stream.open("SampleFile.txt", ios::binary);
stream.seekg(0, ios::end);
length = stream.tellg();
stream.seekg(0, ios::beg);

//read stream 1024 bytes at a time until all bytes of file are used
buffer = new char[1024];
bool eof = false;
while(!eof)
{
    stream.read(buffer, 1024);
    cout.write(buffer, 1024);
    if(stream.eof())
        eof = true;
    //cout << i << endl;
    //cout.write(buffer, 1024);
}

stream.close();
delete[] buffer;
return 0;
}

What am I missing?

Answer 1

As you already know, you have a wrong size of buffer. The other thing is the read of less than 1024 characters (going to happen at the end if your file doesn’t have exactly n*1024 bytes). Take the advantage of istream::gcount which gives you number of characters extracted by last read:

char buffer[1024];
while(stream)
{
    stream.read(buffer, 1024);
    cout.write(buffer, stream.gcount());
}