Thread: Saving data

I am writing a program where i need to save certain variables to the hard drive so that i can load them when my program runs again. What is the best way to do this? I have arrays of structures with strings in them and int*'s. Thanks for any help, i really don't know much about io. so any help is appreciated

simply write them to a file via the iostream classes.

Code:

ofstream out_file;
out_file.open("this.txt");
out_file << szText << x;  //there's undoubtedly a much better way to do this
out_file.close();

you might want to give some thought to how you're going to organize the file. i recommend writing small functions to keep track of every byte spent, so that only 4 bytes are dedicated to an integer, 8 to a double, and everything until a zero for a string. you might also want to put some characters marking the data type before you load it. opening looks like this:

Code:

ifstream in_file;
in_file.open("this.txt");
in_file >> variable1 >> variable2; //unrealistic
in_file.close();

if you want to skip right over any kind of security and optimizing, just put a newline between variables and load like so:

Code:

ofstream out_file;
out_file.open("this.txt");
int x; float y; char *z; //z might need to be initialized beforehand
strcpy (z,"a cleverly worded message"); 

out_file << x << endl << y << endl << z << endl;
out_file.close();

....

ifstream in_file("this.txt");
in_file >> x >> y;
in_file.getline(z);  //this could be wrong... check syntax to be sure
in_file.close();