Thread: Proper use of seekg

I am trying to change the position stream pointer for input to the beginning of a file using

Code:

    encodedfile.clear();
    encodedfile.seekg(0);

but after printing out encodedfile.tellg() afterwards, the pointer stays at -1 and I can't read any of the text inside the file.

Here is the declaration of the variable

Code:

std::fstream encodedfile(encodedfilename,std::fstream::in | std::fstream::out);

and this is where text is outputted to the file

Code:

while(file >> std::noskipws >> ch)
    {
        encodedfile << hasbinary[(unsigned int)ch].binaryencoding;
        cout << hasbinary[(unsigned int)ch].binaryencoding;
    }

Is there another way to return the stream pointer to the beginning or is there a way to fix my code?