using fstream to read every character including spaces and newline

Question

I wanted to use fstream to read a txt file.

I am using inFile >> characterToConvert, but the problem is that this omits any spaces an

Answer 1

You can call int fstream::get(), which will read a single character from the stream. You can also use istream& fstream::read(char*, streamsize), which does the same operation as get(), just over multiple characters. The given links include examples of using each method.

I also recommend reading and writing in binary mode. This allows ASCII control characters to be properly read from and written to files. Otherwise, an encrypt/decrypt operation pair might result in non-identical files. To do this, you open the filestream with the ios::binary flag. With a binary file, you want to use the read() method.