Reading into & from a buffer

hi,
wondering if someone could help on best way to read a file into a buffer in such a way as to be able to set the seek() on the buffer (or file position), and then read from that buffer based on the buffer's (file) position? Instead of using &read() function for every call.

Example;

Firstly read a whole file into a buffer.
And then using the buffer, being able to do something like this;

Code:

---

        offset = 0;
        buffer.seekp(offset);
        buffer.seekg(offset);
        buffer.read((char*)&cChar,sizeof(cChar));
        cout<<"cChar: "<<cChar<<endl;

---

I'm still relatively new to file i/o, so any help would be great.
Thanks!

I'm sure there's a reason you're not using array indexing, but you'll have to tell me what it is. Are you trying to write something that works on both a stream and a block of memory?

array indexing, for file i/o's? Don't know - as I said, I'm still trying to grasp some file i/o aspects.
I want to be able to read/write but not directly to file all the time, since I'm guessing that requires disc reading/writing each time an operation is done (yes?). Hence why I want to use a buffer, but I'm not sure the best way to go about doing that. But I'd like to be able to set the file position still on the buffer itself & read/write to/from the buffer and then to/from the file.


I'm just not sure how to approach it (syntax), many of the articles I've read aren't very helpful/descriptive, so if there's some (other) way in doing something like this, I'm open to suggestions.

But a buffer isn't file i/o, unless we mean radically different things by those terms from each other. You would read a chunk of a file into a buffer. But a buffer is just an array of bytes/characters. (Or you can write to a buffer, but again that's just a chunk of memory as an array, not a file in itself.)

hhmm...ok. Makes sense.
So essentially, once a part/whole file has been read-in to some sort of array, then it simply gets treated as such; an array. So you can't really perform file i/o functions on the array (directly like you would a file).


So, what's the best type to read-in data that'll keep a file 'as is', byte for byte? char*/string/both?


Thanks for the clarification. All this time I was thinking that the buffer is some sort of file i/o mechanism :confused:.