Hi. Suppose I write a string object to a file with

Now, I can read it with

Now my question is, when I write the file, the size will be determined by the length of the string in the object. But when reading it, how does the compiler know how many bytes to read from the file? Shouldn't the size of each object be different.

Thanks.

Chances are that when you think you are resizing your object, you're actually resizing an area of heap memory which is pointed to by a pointer inside your object. This means that when you read or write your object, it's always the same length, but when you read it that pointer is not going to point to something you want. You're going to have to figure out some other way to serialize your object.

Assuming that 'MyObject' is of fixed length (i.e. no pointers that get allocated memory), then your code should work fine. What reinterpret_cast is doing in your code is just changing the way c++ interprets the memory location, i.e. instead of being the variables in that class, it turns it into a large string of characters which can be written out to file (This is how all data is saved anyway including integers/floats when it's saved in binary form).

The reason why read knows what length to read is because of the fixed length, i.e. the sizeof(MyObject) doesn't change. If you however have say a character array defined as a pointer and then allocated as the program is executed, then even your write could will not be 'writing' properly as sizeof(MyObject) will NOT return the length of the character array because it is originally defined as a pointer that is pointing to a location in memory. So, just be careful with pointers in general.

Another point with pointers is that although you will store the correct memory location pointed by the pointer, the next time you run the program, there's no reason why it would be put into the same memory space and hence your pointer (read fromt he file) might well be pointing outside your programs memory space which will cause a segmentation fault.

I know all of this. I forgot to mention that myObject is an std::string object. In that case, I think the code will not work. Am I right?

You are right, for reasons stated. lol