Thread: Read file into variable

Hello,

I started learning C++ yesterday and have been working through the tutorials. I have come to the part regarding File I/O and am a little stuck...

Code:

 ifstream ifile("test.txt");
 ifile >> old_ans;
 ifile.close();

 cout << "File contents:\n\n" << old_ans;

The above is a snippet from my code, the problem is cout'ing old_ans only outputs the first word from the file, how should i go about outputting the whole file contents?

My previous experience is with PHP in which i would just use:

Code:

$var = file_get_contents('text.txt');
etc

But being a c++ newbie i am a little stuck on a simple problem.

Thank you for any help or advice you can give me.

Thank you Micko, that worked nicely

Hi,

You need to know that the ">>" operator has a special method of reading input: it skips all leading whitespace(spaces, tabs, newlines) until it finds something to read, then it starts reading input, and then it stops reading input when it encounters any whitespace.

Thank you for the information 7stud, that explains the behaviour of my original code.

On the bright side, a mistake made leads to a lesson learned.