Thread: flush()?

what is the flush() function defined in fstream.h?

yeah, i was wondering that question, can you xplain it a little better?

"Buffering", as you may already be aware, stores data in an array until one of two conditions occur. (Oversimplifying here, but it'll give you a "leg up" on what's taking place.)

The first condition is an "overflow" of the buffer (array) which signals the compiler to "write" the contents of the buffer to the appropriate file. Simply put, the buffer is full and it's time to empty it.

The second condition (the subject of this thread) is when the buffer is "flushed". This 'forces' the writing of the buffer contents to the appropriate file, typically, before the buffer is full.

A trivial, but perhaps enlightening, example of implicit flushing is the "tie" between cout and cin.

Code:

std::cout << "Enter your age: ";
std::cin >> age;

Since the output stream is buffered, unless it were "flushed", the user wouldn't see the prompt, i.e. the buffer would hold our prompt message until the buffer was full.

However, due to the tie between 'ostream' and 'istream', there is an implicit call, cout.flush(), that forces the message to be displayed before extracting data to the input stream.

Buffering is actually a far more complicated topic than what I've attempted to give you here, but I hope this helps a little.

-Skipper