Re: File IO Question

From:
"Jim Langston" <tazmaster@rocketmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:09:26 -0800
Message-ID:
<mtcsj.168$KO4.150@newsfe05.lga>
JackC wrote:

On 11 Feb, 19:25, Rolf Magnus <ramag...@t-online.de> wrote:

JackC wrote:

Hi,

Im having some problems working out how I can read the last 5 bytes
of a file which i already have open. Heres what i have tried:

pFile = fopen ("/home/jc/data.txt" , "rw");

// Some IO here (preserve position pointer required)

// Read in last 5 bytes
fseek(pFile, 5, SEEK_SET);
fgets(buffer, 5, pFile);

// More IO here (resume old position pointer)

fclose(pFile);

This doesn't work because SEEK_SET adds 5 onto the end of the file,


No. It adds 5 to the beginning of the file. What you need to use is
SEEK_END.

i need a way to set the position to the current end - 5 bytes,
whilst preserving the current position once im done.


Use an offset of -5.

Any ideas on how to approach this? I thought about getting the file
size and using fseek with SEEK_SET from the beginning of the file,
but i think this would involve closing/reopening the file which i
would like to avoid.


Why would you need to close the file for that?


Thanks, sorry that was a typo in my code i did mean SEEK_END, but i
didn't think i could use a negative offset.

If i try this:
fseek(pFile, -5, SEEK_END);
fgets(buffer, 5, pFile);

It doesn't read the last 5 characters, but instead I just get some
random chars back.

Any ideas?


I tried this program to see if I could find any problems. It gives me the
first 4 characters of the file, and the last 4 characters of the file.
Rudimentary error checking since that wasn't my main concern. It seems to
work as expected for me. Remember that the fgets wants to save 1 spot for
the null terminator, so telling it to read 5 will read 4 and add a null
temrinator.

#include <cstdio>
#include <vector>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    FILE* Input = std::fopen("C:/test.txt", "r");
    if ( Input == NULL )
    {
        std::cout << "Error occured opening file." << "\n";
        return 0;
    }

    std::vector<char> Data( 10 );

    if ( fgets( &Data[0], 5, Input ) == NULL )
        std::cout << "Error occured reading";
    else
        std::cout << "Data:" << &Data[0] << "\n";

    std::fseek( Input, -5, SEEK_END );

    if ( fgets( &Data[0], 5, Input ) == NULL )
        std::cout << "Error occured reading";
    else
        std::cout << "Data:" << &Data[0] << "\n";

    std::fclose( Input );

}

--
Jim Langston
tazmaster@rocketmail.com

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