How to read until EOF from cin in C++

Question

The only way you can read a variable amount of data from stdin is using loops. I've always found that the std::getline() function works very well:

std::string line;
while (std::getline(std::cin, line))
{
    std::cout << line << std::endl;
}

By default getline() reads until a newline. You can specify an alternative termination character, but EOF is not itself a character so you cannot simply make one call to getline().

Using loops:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
...
// numbers
int n;
while (cin >> n)
{
   ...
}
// lines
string line;
while (getline(cin, line))
{
   ...
}
// characters
char c;
while (cin.get(c))
{
   ...
}

resource

You can do it without explicit loops by using stream iterators. I'm sure that it uses some kind of loop internally.

#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <istream>
#include <ostream>
#include <iterator>

int main()
{
// don't skip the whitespace while reading
  std::cin >> std::noskipws;

// use stream iterators to copy the stream to a string
  std::istream_iterator<char> it(std::cin);
  std::istream_iterator<char> end;
  std::string results(it, end);

  std::cout << results;
}

After researching KeithB's solution using std::istream_iterator, I discovered the std:istreambuf_iterator.

Test program to read all piped input into a string, then write it out again:

#include <iostream>
#include <iterator>
#include <string>

int main()
{
  std::istreambuf_iterator<char> begin(std::cin), end;
  std::string s(begin, end);
  std::cout << s;
}

Probable simplest and generally efficient:

#include <iostream>
int main()
{
    std::cout << std::cin.rdbuf();
}

If needed, use stream of other types like std::ostringstream as buffer instead of standard output stream here.

Sad side note: I decided to use C++ IO to be consistent with boost based code. From answers to this question I chose while (std::getline(std::cin, line)). Using g++ version 4.5.3 (-O3) in cygwin (mintty) i got 2 MB/s throughput. Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 (/O2) made it 40 MB/s for the same code.

After rewriting the IO to pure C while (fgets(buf, 100, stdin)) the throughput jumped to 90 MB/s in both tested compilers. That makes a difference for any input bigger than 10 MB...