Open file by its full path in C

Question

I want the user to give me the full path where the file exists and not just the file name  How do I open the file this way   Is it something like this   ifstream file  file open  C  Demo txt   ios  in     This doesn t seem to work

User · Answer

You can use a full path with the fstream classes. The folowing code attempts to open the file demo.txt in the root of the C: drive. Note that as this is an input operation, the file must already exist.

#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
   ifstream ifs( "c:/demo.txt" );       // note no mode needed
   if ( ! ifs.is_open() ) {                 
      cout <<" Failed to open" << endl;
   }
   else {
      cout <<"Opened OK" << endl;
   }
}

What does this code produce on your system?

User · Answer

The code seems working to me  I think the same with  Iothar   Check to see if you include the required headers  to compile  If it is compiled  check to see if there is such a file  and everything  names etc  matches  and also check to see that you have a right to read the file   To make a cross check  check if you can open it with fopen    FILE  f   fopen  C  Demo txt    r    if  f    printf  fopen success n

User · Answer

Normally one uses the backslash character as the path separator in Windows  So   ifstream file  file open  C   Demo txt   ios  in     Keep in mind that when written in C   source code  you must use the double backslash because the backslash character itself means something special inside double quoted strings  So the above refers to the file C  Demo txt

User · Answer

A different take on this question  which might help someone  I came here because I was debugging in Visual Studio on Windows  and I got confused about all this   vs    discussion  it really should not matter in most cases   For me  the problem was  the  quot current directory quot  was not set to what I wanted in Visual Studio  It defaults to the directory of the executable  depending on how you set up your project   Change it via  Right-click the solution - gt  Properties - gt  Working Directory I only mention it because the question seems Windows-centric  which generally also means VisualStudio-centric  which tells me this hint might be relevant

User · Answer

For those who are getting the path dynamicly    e g  drag amp drop   Some main constructions get drag amp dropped file with double quotes like    C  MyPath MyFile txt    Quick and nice solution is to use this function to remove chars from string   void removeCharsFromString  string  amp str  char  charsToRemove        for   unsigned int i   0  i  lt  strlen charsToRemove     i           str erase  remove str begin    str end    charsToRemove i    str end               string myAbsolutepath    fill with your absolute path removeCharsFromString  myAbsolutepath            myAbsolutepath now contains just C  MyPath MyFile txt  The function needs these libraries   lt iostream gt   lt algorithm gt   lt cstring gt   The function was based on this answer   Working Fiddle  http   ideone com XOROjq

[c++] Open file by its full path in C++

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