How to read and write to a text file in C++?

Question

Hey everyone, I have just started to learn C++ and I wanted to know how to read and write to a text file. I have seen many examples but they have all been hard to understand

Answer 1

Default c++ mechanism for file IO is called streams. Streams can be of three flavors: input, output and inputoutput. Input streams act like sources of data. To read data from an input stream you use >> operator:

istream >> my_variable; //This code will read a value from stream into your variable.

Operator >> acts different for different types. If in the example above my_variable was an int, then a number will be read from the strem, if my_variable was a string, then a word would be read, etc. You can read more then one value from the stream by writing istream >> a >> b >> c; where a, b and c would be your variables.

Output streams act like sink to which you can write your data. To write your data to a stream, use << operator.

ostream << my_variable; //This code will write a value from your variable into stream.

As with input streams, you can write several values to the stream by writing something like this:

ostream << a << b << c;

Obviously inputoutput streams can act as both.

In your code sample you use cout and cin stream objects. cout stands for console-output and cin for console-input. Those are predefined streams for interacting with default console.

To interact with files, you need to use ifstream and ofstream types. Similar to cin and cout, ifstream stands for input-file-stream and ofstream stands for output-file-stream.

Your code might look like this:

#include 
#include 

using namespace std;

int start()
{
    cout << "Welcome...";

    // do fancy stuff

    return 0;
}

int main ()
{
    string usreq, usr, yn, usrenter;

    cout << "Is this your first time using TEST" << endl;
    cin >> yn;
    if (yn == "y")
    {
        ifstream iusrfile;
        ofstream ousrfile;
        iusrfile.open("usrfile.txt");
        iusrfile >> usr;
        cout << iusrfile; // I'm not sure what are you trying to do here, perhaps print iusrfile contents?
        iusrfile.close();
        cout << "Please type your Username. \n";
        cin >> usrenter;
        if (usrenter == usr)
        {
            start ();
        }
    }
    else
    {
        cout << "THAT IS NOT A REGISTERED USERNAME.";
    }

    return 0;
}

For further reading you might want to look at c++ I/O reference