Thread: I can't output this, no matter how hard I try

I try to output a specific character into a file, but everytime I do, it just stands "unterminated string or character constant" and "possible real start of unterminated constant".

It's not a: \, a: ' or a: " which I'm trying to output, it's another character.

I've also tried to put a: \, before the character, but it doesn't help.

Although I know that it's possible to output this character because I have another program that does it.


I haven't got a clue!

What's the mystery character?

Else, it would look like this: ^Z, even though it's not the same character as the one I'm talking about.


*Still: *

If you are trying to write ^Z, I think you might have problems because I think that it might be the EOF representation. If not, ignore me but I just thought that I read that before.

Well, you'll need to be writing in binary mode (if using ofstream, use ios::binary).

Then, make an unsigned character which contains the ASCII code (26) you want to write, then output that, without using the stream operator <<, which sometimes screws up format characters (esp. CR/LF) .

Something like this:

unsigned char c = 26;
fileOut.write(&c,1);

I think you need to #include <iostream> for cout, etc; maybe fstream will cover it, but haven't seen it used that way.
Also, why do you have a semi-colon after std::endl?
You might try cout'ingthe Ctrl-Z character by itself. But why do you want it? Just close the file. Ctrl-Z is usually entered by the user to signify EOF when interacting with the program. Maybe you want to check for EOF some other way. There are ways to do it.
If I'm misreading what you're trying to do, sorry.

Originally posted by Zewu
I've tried a number of variants of your suggestions but nothing works, so I just hand the code over to you:


#include <fstream>

int main()
{
std::cout << "Creating file..." << std::endl;
std:fstream thefile("thefile.dat");

std::cout << "Writing to file..." << std::endl; thefile << "other text";

return 0;
}


What should I replace the  with, and how can I get it's binary value? And should I also convert the other text to binary format?

Please fix this code once and for all.

Have you tried opening the stream like this:

ofstream thefile("thefile.dat",ios::binary);

Fstream is derived from iostream, ifstream, and ofstream. Therefore, when including it, you do not need to include iostream. If you do, it might even give you an error.

According to what my compsci teacher says it won't give you an error ever. It's simple, fstream uses iostream; fstream.h incudes iostream.h.

That's cool, I never knew that.