Thread: whose the c++ wizard

my objective is to simply read in characters and store it in a multidimensional character array.

file format .. 50 lines of 80 characters
example
155157JOHN Q. PUBLIC 00015787
155238HELEN GONE 00015687

trying to read from a employee.dat file until the end of file, but keeps on getting segmentation error.

int main()
{
ifstream data;
char string[80];
char s1[50][80];
int i=0;

data.open("c:/employee.dat",ios::in);

if(!data)
{
cerr << "file cannot be opened! " << endl;
exit(1);
}

while(!data.eof())
{
data.get(string,80,'\n');
strcpy(s1[i],string);
cout << s1[i] << endl;
i++;
}

data.close();

return(0);
}

Code:

.......
if(!data) 
    { 

        cerr << "File cannot be opened!" << endl;
        system("PAUSE");
        return 0;                    // you need to exit the program or you'll get the error

    } 
........

You might wanna change this:

while(!data.eof())
{
data.get(string,80,'\n');
strcpy(s1[i],string);
cout << s1[i] << endl;
i++;
}

to this:

i=0;
data.get(string,80,'\n');
while(!data.eof())
{
strcpy(s1[i],string);
cout << s1[i] << endl;
i++;
data.get(string,80,'\n');
}


I think that .eof() checks if EOF is in the input buffer. Hence, you wanna input, make sure it isn't eof, then copy the data over. If you don't, you might get some garbage written at the end of the array.