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

For those who are getting the path dynamicly... e.g. drag&drop:

Some main constructions get drag&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 &str, char* charsToRemove ) {
   for ( unsigned int i = 0; i < 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: <iostream> <algorithm> <cstring>.
The function was based on this answer.

Working Fiddle: http://ideone.com/XOROjq

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  lt fstream gt   include  lt iostream gt  using namespace std   int main        ifstream ifs   c  demo txt              note no mode needed    if     ifs is open                              cout  lt  lt   Failed to open   lt  lt  endl          else         cout  lt  lt  Opened OK   lt  lt  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

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

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