Binary file I/O issues

Question

Edit: I'm trying to convert a text file into bytes. I'm not sure if the code is turning it into bytes or not. Here is the link to the header so you can see the as_bytes function.

link

#include "std_lib_facilities.h"

int main()
{
    cout << "Enter input file name.\n";
    string file;
    cin >> file;
    ifstream in(file.c_str(), ios::binary);

    int i;
    vector<int> bin;

    while(in.read(as_bytes(i), sizeof(int)))
        bin.push_back(i);

    ofstream out(file.c_str(), ios::out);

    for(int i = 0; i < bin.size(); ++i)
            out << bin[i];

    keep_window_open();
}

Note that now the out stream just outputs the contents of the vector. It doesn't use the write function or the binary mode. This converts the file to a large line of numbers - is this what I'm looking for?

Here is an example of the second code's file conversion:

that guy likes to eat lots of pie (not sure if this was exact text)

turns to

543518319544825700191924850016351970295432362115448292821701667182186922608417526375411952522351186935715718643976841768956006

Answer 1

The reason your first method didn't change the file is because all files are stored in the same way. The only "difference" between text files and binary files is that text files contain only bytes that can be shown as ASCII characters, while binary files* have a much more random variety and order of bytes. So you are reading bytes in as bytes and then outputting them as bytes again!

*I'm including Unicode text files as binary, since they can have multiple bytes to denote one character point, depending on the character point and the encoding used.

The second method is also fairly simple. You are reading in the bytes, as before, and storing them in integers (which are probably 4 bytes long). Then you are just printing out the integers as if they are integers, so you are seeing a string of numbers.

As for why your first method cut off some of the bytes, you're right in that it's probably some bug in your code. I thought it was more important to explain what the ideas are in this case, rather than debug some test code.