Thread: File I/O example from book won't work

Hey guys,

the following code snippet is from my textbook (section about file I/O):

Code:

// datacopy.cpp
#include <cstdlib>
#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;

int main() {

    ifstream source;
    string sFilename;
    cout << "Source file: ";
    cin >> sFilename;

    source.open(sFilename.c_str(), ios::binary|ios::in);
    if (!source) {
        cerr << sFilename << " cannot be opened.\n";
        exit(-1);
    }

    cout << "Target file: ";
    string tFilename;

    ofstream target(tFilename.c_str(), ios::binary|ios::out);
    if (!target) {
        cerr << tFilename << " cannot be opened.\n";
        exit(-1);
    }

    char ch;
    while (source.get(ch)) {
        target.put(ch);
    }

    source.close();
    target.close();

}

I typed it exactly like it is given in my textbook, but the program wouldn't even let me type in the target's file name.

I tried it with several different source file names, like test_file.txt, test_file, testfile, etc. Seems after typing in the source file name there is something remaining in the input buffer (the '\n'?), right?

Is this an error in the code snippet I should e-mail the author? Or am I wrong somewhere and don't see it myself?

EDIT: Here's an example output, just for clarification:

[dennis@marx k2]$ ./datacopy
Source file: datacopytest
Target file: cannot be opened.
[dennis@marx k2]$

That code won't compile due to a typo on line 17.

At no point has your code read a string in for the target file name.

As I noted in my previous post, the code is NEVER reading in a name for the target file.