Setting a pointer to file data

I was wondering if there was any way of setting a pointer to the data of a file. I would use:

Code:

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ifstream name (argv[1])

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That would open the file, but is there any way to make a variable point to the start of "name". The file is ASCII *.txt file. Also, is there a way to delete characters in a file?

Welcome to the boards.

To have a pointer to the files contents, you will have to read the files contents into a buffer. There are many ways to do this. Here's one way to read the entire contents of a file into a dynamically allocated buffer:

Code:

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#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
#include <memory>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    // open the stream as binary so we can get the size of the file
    ifstream f("input.txt", ios::in | ios::binary);
    if (!f)
    {
        cout << "Failed to open" << endl;
        return 1;
    }//if

    // get the size of the file
    f.seekg(0, ios::end);
    size_t fsz = f.tellg();
    f.seekg(0, ios::beg);

    // allocate room for the file's contents and a null terminator
    auto_ptr<char> fp_ap(new char[fsz + 1]);
    char *fp = fp_ap.get();

    // read in the whole file
    f.read(fp, fsz);
    f.close();
    if (!f.good())
    {
        cerr << "Failed to read" << endl;
        return 2;
    }//if

    // null terminate the entire file contents as a string
    fp[fsz] = 0;

    cout << fp << endl;

    return 0;
}//main

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gg