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Hello,
I'm appending to a file with a c++ program, at the end of the program, I seekg to the point in the file where I opened it and write the number of records I wrote to the file, unfortunately I am encountering these problems :
if i use ios::app for append operations it will no allow me to reposition the file pointer, making it useless for my purposes.
if I use ios::ate, which should allow me to open a file with the file pointer positioned at the end of the stream, the ios::ate flag acts like an ios::trunc flag and wipes all the previouly written data.
If anyone could shed some light on this behavior it would be illuminating.
I'm sorry if i seem a bit sarcastic but yes, yes I have tried the ios::in and ios:ut flags and every possible combination of them in the ofstream constructors.
Older & more experienced programmers than myself have told be that they never use the c++ fstream objects and always utilise the traditional C interface. Personally I like the c++ tool kit but once the tools start to fail at trivial things like this, then you've got problems
First let's assure, that I understand what you want to do: You want to open an existing file, append some data, then go back to the position where you started to append and write some other data at that position; was that correct so far? If yes, then you first have to know, that you cannot insert new data into the middle of a file, but only overwrite existing data. Here I wrote an example that will do so:
Code:
#include <fstream>
using namespace std;
int main(){
const char* filename = "test.txt";
//just build a little sample file
ofstream sampleFile(filename);
sampleFile << "This is a sample content\n";
sampleFile.close();
//declare a new file object for appending and "overwriting"...
fstream file(filename, ios::ate | ios::out | ios::in);
//...mark the current position...
long changePos = file.tellp();
file << "This text will be changed\n";
//..append something else
file << "Append some other text";
//...overwrite previous contents
file.seekp(changePos);
file << "changed text ";
file.close();
return 0;
}
If you want to "really" insert new data, you have to copy the file into a buffer, modify that buffer and then write it back to the file.
agreed, I had only intended to overwrite (not insert) data at a specfified position, in a manner similar to what you've done in your sample code (much obliged for the demo), however I've tried to do exactly what you've been doing only I also include the ios::binary flag, as I am writing pure binary data.
I don't know if this is the source of the problem, I will investigate...
No, I don't think that the 'ios::banary' flag is a problem. But if you want to overwrite some data of an existing file without blanking it, you have to make sure, that you open the file with both 'ios::in' and 'ios:ut' flags. The rest should work.
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