In order to improve performance reading from a file, I'm trying to read the entire content of a big (several MB) file into memory and then use a istringstream to access the information.
My question is, which is the best way to read this information and "import it" into the string stream? A problem with this approach (see bellow) is that when creating the string stream the buffers gets copied, and memory usage doubles.
#include <fstream>
#include <sstream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
ifstream is;
is.open (sFilename.c_str(), ios::binary );
// get length of file:
is.seekg (0, std::ios::end);
long length = is.tellg();
is.seekg (0, std::ios::beg);
// allocate memory:
char *buffer = new char [length];
// read data as a block:
is.read (buffer,length);
// create string stream of memory contents
// NOTE: this ends up copying the buffer!!!
istringstream iss( string( buffer ) );
// delete temporary buffer
delete [] buffer;
// close filestream
is.close();
/* ==================================
* Use iss to access data
*/
}