Re: Binary file IO: Converting imported sequences of chars to desired type

From:
Rune Allnor <allnor@tele.ntnu.no>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:07:35 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<ef3dd5e0-440b-4419-99c6-4b67305360c9@x37g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>
On 17 Okt, 19:47, Maxim Yegorushkin <maxim.yegorush...@gmail.com>
wrote:

On 17/10/09 18:39, Rune Allnor wrote:

Hi all.

I have used the method from this page,

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostream/istream/read/

to read some binary data from a file to a char[] buffer.

The 4 first characters constitute the binary encoding of
a float type number. What is the better way to transfer
the chars to a float variable?

The naive C way would be to use memcopy. Is there a
better C++ way?


This is the correct way since memcpy() allows you to copy unaligned data
into an aligned object.

Another way is to read data directly into the aligned object:

     float f;
     stream.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(&f), sizeof f);


The naive

std::vector<float> v;
for (n=0;n<N;++n)
{
   file.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(&f), sizeof f);
   v.push_back(v);
}

doesn't work as expected. Do I need to call 'seekg'
inbetween?

Rune

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