saving data (as binary?) and importing it into C++ as an integer?

I'm making a 2D tile RPG clone of dragon warrior (NES).

I have a text file that looks like this:

1111111
1000001
1000001
1111111

Each digit represents a specific tile in a specific coordinate on the map.

Anyway, I found out that when the file is saved as a text file, the data is read in (using fread()) in ASCII.

I dont want this as then I am limited to storing 10 tiles as digits and the rest being other symbols. I would like to store all tiles as integers.

I would then assume that I would need to change the external file to a binary format. How can I save a text file as binary? or just save directly to a binary file?

To open a file stream for reading in binary mode, either use ifstream as binary, or fstream with ios_base::in and ios_base::binary bitwise OR'd together:

ifstream in ( filename, ios_base::binary );

or

fstream in ( filename, ios_base::in | ios_base::binary );

It is also possible to open a file stream for both reading and writing by OR'ing together ios_base::in and ios_base::out.

Even with:

ifstream in ( filename, ios_base::binary );

The data is still coming into my program as ASCII.

Using binary mode to read in the data presumes that the data was written to the file as binary integers in the first place. If your text file truly just consists of zero and ones in character format I suggest you read in the data character by character and just convert to integers as you go along.

How about showing us the code that writes and reads in the file along with the definition for the data structure you are storing the data in.

Here is what my code looks like:

Code:

---

struct MAP {
    BITMAP *map[20][15];
    unsigned int tileID[20][15];
};

ifstream mapInput ("worldmap.txt", ios_base::binary );
   
for(int y=0; y<worldY; y++) {
    for(int x=0; x<worldX; x++) {
        tileID[x][y] = mapInput.get();
    }
}
       
mapInput.close();

---

I'd also like to point out that my maps are not all 1's and 0's. They really could be any number.

It would probably be best to separate the data with spaces or commas. I guess I'd actually prefer if my maps looked like this:

001 001 001 001 001 001 001
001 000 000 000 000 000 001
001 000 000 255 000 000 001
001 000 000 000 000 000 001
001 001 001 001 001 001 001