Why can't I read fstream's binary data with operator>>?

Question

If I do something like the following:

ifstream file;
file.open(\"somefile\", ios::binary);

unsigned int data;

file >> data;

My stre

Answer 1

It should be done as described by you. However, the C++ standard designers are not very elegant. In fact, there are a lot of flaws in the design of C++, even C++11 and C++14 has lots of defects.

The ideal C++ design should be that:

1.For text file:

ifstream fin_txt("input.txt");
int i;
float j;
double k;
fin_txt >> i >> j >> k;

This will read in 3 strings and parse into integer, float and double, and store them into i, j, and k respectively.

2.For binary file:

ifstream fin_txt("input.bin", ios::binary);
int i;
float j;
double k;
fin_txt >> i >> j >> k;

This will read in 4/8 bytes (depending on whether int is 32-bit or 64-bit), 4 bytes and 8 bytes binary data and store them into i, j, and k respectively.

Unfortunately, the current design is to report an error for Case 2. Maybe this can be achieved in C++22.