Thread: Problem reading file

Hi,

I am stuck with a weird problem that i am not able to understand.

I am trying to make a utility in C language that extracts a part of an MP3 file and writes it to an output file.

What i am currently doing is that i open the input file using _open() in binary mode and read the file byte by byte using _read(). However when it reads byte 1Ah (26 in decimal), _read() returns 0 indicating End Of File. This byte is the 103rd byte in the file, which is almost the start of file, so it is actually not the end of file. The file itself is of size 2.89 MB.
Secondly, EOF is defined as -1 not 26. So why is _read() indicating EOF.

By the way i have also tried fread() but it also has the same problem.

I am using MS Visual Studio 2000 under Windows XP.


Please suggest some solution as this problem is driving me crazy.

Thanx

You have to use fopen() with binary mode "rb".

I have no idea what _open and _read are on Windows, but they are probably fake and they most likely don't support opening in binary mode which is what you need.

Secondly, EOF is defined as -1 not 26. So why is _read() indicating EOF.

Because on Windows, if a file is opened in text mode, the presence of byte 0x1A is considered to be EOF.

Ctrl-Z (0x1A) is used as an end-of-file marker in MS land, as I recall. C does give you (char)-1 when it reads EOF, but that's not because -1 is stored in the file; that's just how C does things so that everything works (kinda) the same across different platforms.

fread should have worked, I would think -- care to provide details?

Here's the code:

Code:

FILE *fp;
	char data_byte;
	int count=0;
		
	fp = fopen("song.mp3","r");

	if(fp==NULL)
	{
		perror("Error Opening Source File: ");
		return;
	}

	fseek(fp,(long)0,SEEK_SET);
	
	while (1)
	{
		fread(data_byte,1,1,fp);
		if(feof(fp))
			break;
		count++;
	}
	
	printf("byte count = %d\n",count);

Originally Posted by coder_009

What i am currently doing is that i open the input file using _open() in binary mode

See, there's no reason to tell us this when it's not true. If you want to open a file in binary mode, you need to use "rb" as the mode string, not "r". If you don't, the file will open as a text file, which means weird things will happen with bytes like 0x0a (=\r) and 0x0d (=\n) and 0x1a (=EOF).

EDIT TO ADD: I should mention, I'm not saying you deliberately lied to us or anything; but if you had shown source code the first time we would have known where the error is, instead of having to choose between several different things.

Originally Posted by tabstop

I'm not saying you deliberately lied to us or anything;

i did not lie. I also have the code that uses _open(), but since you guys stressed more on fopen, feof() so i posted this code.

anyways here it is, please tell me if i am missing something here

Code:

 	fd = _open("song.mp3",_O_RDONLY , _O_BINARY);

Thanx guys ! problem is solved using fread(). Using "rb" in fopen works. But i'd also like to know about the _open();

Try

Code:

fd = _open("song.mp3", _O_RDONLY | _O_BINARY);

According to MS docs, _O_BINARY belongs in the second argument, not the third (which is not applicable for reading files). And of course, bit-flags must be OR'ed together for them both to be active.

yeah, i got it. Thanx a lot man !!!