Thread: Help with opening files

Hey all,
I need to open a file for reading. I know that usually you would declare an object like so:

Code:

fstream InputFile; // declaring a stream object
InputFile.open("myfile", ios::in);

Only problem is I need to declare the filename I need to open at a prompt. In other words, 'myfile' is the filename that needs to be opened but its a variable. How would I go about doing that? Thank you.

Code:

#include <string>

string Filename;

cin<<Filename;
//of course, you want to put some error checking after the cin

ifstream ifs;
ifs.open(Filename.c_str(),ios::in);

How about if you want to check if the user entered an escape sentinel like 0 to exit out of the program. Would your code look something like this?

Code:

if (Filename.c_str() == '0'){
    cerr << "Thank  you for using this program";
    return 0;
}