Thread: Trouble writing to file

First off, this is for a class, I'm really trying to learn this and be able to do it on my own but when a hang up occurs and you only have 24 hours to finish it one must take drastic actions. So I plead for help from the learned ones...

I want to write the information stored in the 'Pets' array to a file called 'animals.txt...

I know that this code looks really twisted, I'm using a list to automatically populate my data members of the 'Animal' class.

Where am I going wrong?

Code:

//initial code, initialization of data members....	


fstream theFile("C:\\Junkdata\\Animals.txt");
	
	//fstream theFile((char *) &Pets, ios::out | ios::app | ios::binary);
	if(!theFile)
	{
		cout << "File object not created...";
		return 999;
	}

	

	theFile.close();

	theFile.open((char *) &Pets, ios::in | ios::binary);
	if(theFile.fail())
	{
		cout << "Unable to open input file....";
		return 9999;
	}

	//Animal generic;
	

	theFile.read((char *) &Pets, sizeof(Animal)); 
	for(int a(0); a < count; a++)
	{
		theFile.write((char *) &Pets[a++], sizeof(Animal));
		if(a = 0)
		{
			Header();
		}
		if(a == count)
		{
			cout << "Total number of animals: " << count << endl;
			cout << endl << "David Evans" << endl;
			cout << "ITSE-2431.005" << endl;
			cout << "May 2nd, 2002" << endl;
		}
	}
	
	
	ofstream outFile("C:\\JunkData\\Animals.txt");
	
	if(!outFile)
		{
		cout << "Unable to open file...";
			return 999;
		}

	

	return 0;
}

I've excluded the 'Animal' class as I am not having any difficulty with it and did not think it was relevant for the problem that I'm having. Should anybody like to view it I'll post it immediately.

Thanks a lot for any assistance, hints, and clues.