Set Maximum Number of characters (Precision) for positive and Negative Values

Hi,

I want to be able to jump to a particular line in a CSV file. I have read that in order to do so, each line must have the same size.

Therefore, in writing the data to the file I want to set the number of characters to a specified/set number.

I have tried:

Code:

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file.setf(ios_base::fixed, ios_base::floatfield);
          file.precision(10);

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However, my issue is with negative values. Will negative values take up space?

many thanks

Quote:

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I want to be able to jump to a particular line in a CSV file. I have read that in order to do so, each line must have the same size.

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If you want true random access files I suggest you investigate binary files. Text files are not really suited for random access. If you want to be able to jump to and read from a certain line it is possible, if you keep track of the file position where each line starts. However if you want to try to replace text in the middle of a file, that is a problem. It is usually not recommended to try to replace text in the middle of a text file, because it is not possible to erase a section, or insert text into a section. Text files are best suited for sequential access and appending data to the end of the file.

Jim

Thanks for the heads up jim. Will look in to this! cheers