Re: BUG REPORT: CStdioFile::GetLength() and unix-style text files

From:
Mikel <mikel.luri@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
microsoft.public.vc.mfc
Date:
Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:33:03 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<0f011e9f-82db-4f68-8d70-071185516264@c22g2000prc.googlegroups.com>
On 19 nov, 16:15, Dave Calkins <DaveCalk...@discussions.microsoft.com>
wrote:

Not sure if this is the best place to report this or not. If we should=

 be

sending this elsewhere, please notify and we'll do that.

We've discovered that when reading unix-style text files (i.e. files usin=

g

LF to terminate lines instead of CR LF), CStdioFile::GetLength() can caus=

e

problems. Specifically, during the below read loop, the call to
CStdioFile::GetLength() appears to disturb the file pointer at times, cau=

sing

it to backup in the file to previously read content.

CStdioFile fp;
fp.Open("file",CFile::modeRead);
CString line;
while (fp.ReadString(line))
{
// do stuff with the read line
fp.GetLength();

}

For a sample file, we observed the above loop correctly reading the first=

 8

lines, however, when calling ReadString() to read the 9th line, it had ba=

cked

up to a place in the middle of the lines 2 lines prior. Interestingly,=

 the

terminator (LF) for the 8th line happened to occur at offset 255 in the f=

ile.

Simply removing the call to CStdioFile::GetLength() eliminated the proble=

m

and the entire file was read correctly.

If you examine the source for CStdioFile::GetLength(), you'll see it does
some seeking in the file. So apparently, this is causing problems.

The solution was to simply call CStdioFile::GetLength() only once,
immediately after the file was opened, before any reading was done. By
calling it only once and then just using that value in the loop (it was b=

eing

used to update a progress bar), the code works fine.

We're using MSVC++ 2005 SP1. The source we have in our install path fo=

r the

GetLength() method is shown below for reference.

---
ULONGLONG CStdioFile::GetLength() const
{
   ASSERT_VALID(this);

   LONG nCurrent;
   LONG nLength;
   LONG nResult;

   nCurrent = ftell(m_pStream);
   if (nCurrent == -1)
          AfxThrowFileException(CFileException::invalidFile, _d=

oserrno,

                 m_strFileName);

   nResult = fseek(m_pStream, 0, SEEK_END);
   if (nResult != 0)
          AfxThrowFileException(CFileException::badSeek, _doser=

rno,

                 m_strFileName);

   nLength = ftell(m_pStream);
   if (nLength == -1)
          AfxThrowFileException(CFileException::invalidFile, _d=

oserrno,

                 m_strFileName);
   nResult = fseek(m_pStream, nCurrent, SEEK_SET);
   if (nResult != 0)
          AfxThrowFileException(CFileException::badSeek, _doser=

rno,

                 m_strFileName);

   return nLength;

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Just a comment:
I'm not sure I would call that a bug.
I guess that CStdioFile assumes the files are Windows-Style, not Unix-
Style. In that case, it would be normal it had problems reading unix-
style files. It doesn't read Unicode text files either, and I guess it
doesn't read anything not windows-style well.

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