How do I read an entire file into a std::string in C++?

Question

One way is to flush the stream buffer into a separate memory stream, and then convert that to std::string:

std::string slurp(std::ifstream& in) {
    std::ostringstream sstr;
    sstr << in.rdbuf();
    return sstr.str();
}

This is nicely concise. However, as noted in the question this performs a redundant copy and unfortunately there is fundamentally no way of eliding this copy.

The only real solution that avoids redundant copies is to do the reading manually in a loop, unfortunately. Since C++ now has guaranteed contiguous strings, one could write the following (≥C++14):

auto read_file(std::string_view path) -> std::string {
    constexpr auto read_size = std::size_t{4096};
    auto stream = std::ifstream{path.data()};
    stream.exceptions(std::ios_base::badbit);

    auto out = std::string{};
    auto buf = std::string(read_size, '\0');
    while (stream.read(& buf[0], read_size)) {
        out.append(buf, 0, stream.gcount());
    }
    out.append(buf, 0, stream.gcount());
    return out;
}

The shortest variant: Live On Coliru

std::string str(std::istreambuf_iterator<char>{ifs}, {});

It requires the header <iterator>.

There were some reports that this method is slower than preallocating the string and using std::istream::read. However, on a modern compiler with optimisations enabled this no longer seems to be the case, though the relative performance of various methods seems to be highly compiler dependent.

See this answer on a similar question.

For your convenience, I'm reposting CTT's solution:

string readFile2(const string &fileName)
{
    ifstream ifs(fileName.c_str(), ios::in | ios::binary | ios::ate);

    ifstream::pos_type fileSize = ifs.tellg();
    ifs.seekg(0, ios::beg);

    vector<char> bytes(fileSize);
    ifs.read(bytes.data(), fileSize);

    return string(bytes.data(), fileSize);
}

This solution resulted in about 20% faster execution times than the other answers presented here, when taking the average of 100 runs against the text of Moby Dick (1.3M). Not bad for a portable C++ solution, I would like to see the results of mmap'ing the file ;)

If you have C++17 (std::filesystem), there is also this way (which gets the file's size through std::filesystem::file_size instead of seekg and tellg):

#include <filesystem>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>

namespace fs = std::filesystem;

std::string readFile(fs::path path)
{
    // Open the stream to 'lock' the file.
    std::ifstream f(path, std::ios::in | std::ios::binary);

    // Obtain the size of the file.
    const auto sz = fs::file_size(path);

    // Create a buffer.
    std::string result(sz, '\0');

    // Read the whole file into the buffer.
    f.read(result.data(), sz);

    return result;
}

Note: you may need to use <experimental/filesystem> and std::experimental::filesystem if your standard library doesn't yet fully support C++17. You might also need to replace result.data() with &result[0] if it doesn't support non-const std::basic_string data.

Use

#include <iostream>
#include <sstream>
#include <fstream>

int main()
{
  std::ifstream input("file.txt");
  std::stringstream sstr;

  while(input >> sstr.rdbuf());

  std::cout << sstr.str() << std::endl;
}

or something very close. I don't have a stdlib reference open to double-check myself.

Yes, I understand I didn't write the slurp function as asked.

I do not have enough reputation to comment directly on responses using tellg().

Please be aware that tellg() can return -1 on error. If you're passing the result of tellg() as an allocation parameter, you should sanity check the result first.

An example of the problem:

...
std::streamsize size = file.tellg();
std::vector<char> buffer(size);
...

In the above example, if tellg() encounters an error it will return -1. Implicit casting between signed (ie the result of tellg()) and unsigned (ie the arg to the vector<char> constructor) will result in a your vector erroneously allocating a very large number of bytes. (Probably 4294967295 bytes, or 4GB.)

Modifying paxos1977's answer to account for the above:

string readFile2(const string &fileName)
{
    ifstream ifs(fileName.c_str(), ios::in | ios::binary | ios::ate);

    ifstream::pos_type fileSize = ifs.tellg();
    if (fileSize < 0)                             <--- ADDED
        return std::string();                     <--- ADDED

    ifs.seekg(0, ios::beg);

    vector<char> bytes(fileSize);
    ifs.read(&bytes[0], fileSize);

    return string(&bytes[0], fileSize);
}