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Mac Forum / Programming / Mac Programming / January 2006ifstream and ofstream portability
Hi, I have played around with my own small stream implementation and it worked at least on one platform. But it takes a lot work to implement all the data types to be loaded/saved. My question: Are the standard ifstream/ofstream (binary) platform independant ? I like to use it on Wintel/Mac/Linunx. Thanks, Lothar > I have played around with my own small stream implementation and it > worked at least on > one platform. But it takes a lot work to implement all the data types > to be loaded/saved. > My question: Are the standard ifstream/ofstream (binary) platform > independant ? The definition is platform independent. Implementations may or may not be platform dependent. However, if I understand your question correctly, you are also asking whether a single codebase can read back binary data written on another platform. In general, that is not possible because of: - differences in character encoding between computers - differences in endianness <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness> - differences in the sizes of standard C datatypes such as int and short - differences in the format of standard C datatypes float and double - differences in the way compilers lay out structures and classes in memory (this list probably is incomplete) It is not hard to overcome all of these, but doing so does involve some tedious work (lots of work, if you do not plan ahead, or if the platforms involved differ greatly in some features you want to use) Reinder Yes, until now, I have seen, that they have differences. Thus my first tests failed. Then I have tested ifstream and ofstream classes, that would work at least on non binary mode in eight bit format. (cat test.txt shows up no differences between my Mac and an Intel Linux box) This is a beginning and in my design I have encapsulated those stream classes. So I am able to change this later or use different variants. I know of endianness, I would propably use functions, that handle these issues like socket functions htons and htonl. There may be others to be used or libraries that address these issues. Lothar |
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