Hey. I'm trying to create part of a program that will read data from a text file, store the data into variables and then write the data into a random access file. So far this is what I have.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

#include <conio.h>

#include <fstream> //file stream
using std::fstream; 


struct mealItem 
{
    int idNo; //meal ID number
    char name[22]; //name of meal
    double unitCost; //unit cost of meal
    char descrip[55]; //description of meal
};

typedef struct mealItem item;

int main()
{ 
    item meal; //meal of structure type item

    fstream inFile("Meals.dat", ios::in); //text file
    fstream outFile("Inventory.dat", ios::out, ios::binary); //RAF file

    while(!inFile.eof())
    {

        inFile >> meal.idNo;
        
        inFile.getline (meal.name, 22, ",");
        inFile.ignore();

        inFile >> meal.unitCost;

        inFile.getline (meal.descrip, 55, ".");
        inFile.ignore();

        cout << meal.idNo << "\t" << meal.unitCost << "\n";

        outFile.seekp((meal.idNo - 100) * sizeof(item));
        outFile.write(reinterpret_cast<char*> (&meal), sizeof(item));
        

    } //endwhile
    
    inFile.close();
    outFile.close();

    getch();
    return 0;
} //end of main program

But when I go to compile the program, I'm getting this error..

[quote]
error C2664: 'std::basic_istream<_Elem,_Traits> &std::basic_istream<_Elem,_Traits>::getline(_Elem *,std::streamsize,_Elem)' : cannot convert parameter 3 from 'const char [2]' to 'char'
with
[
_Elem=char,
_Traits=std::char_traits<char>
]
There is no context in which this conversion is possible
[/quote]

Any help with this would be most appreciated.

inFile.getline (meal.name, 22, ",");

should be

inFile.getline (meal.name, 22, ',');

and so on. You can tell this by reading the warnings carefully.

Thanks Lundin, I understand now that the characters should've been in single quotes rather than double quotes as the compiler was trying to read a string... or something to that effect.

Now that I've got that part sorted, when I print the data from the file to the screen I'm only seeing half the text i.e if I have 20 lines of text I'm only seeing 10 lines being printed to the screen. I'm wondering if it's my loop. I tried just using the while loop - while (!inFile.eof()) - that my teacher suggested, but that doesn't terminate. So this is what I came up with, but as I said it's only printing half the data.

	if(!inFile.eof())
	{
		while (inFile >> meal.idNo)
		{
			inFile.getline(meal.name, 25, ',');
			inFile.ignore();

			inFile >> meal.unitCost;

			inFile.getline(meal.descrip, 55, '.');
			inFile.ignore();

			cout << setw(3) << meal.idNo << setw(25) << meal.name << setw(10) << meal.unitCost << "\n";
			cout << fixed << setprecision(2); 		} //end while
	} //end if

Strange enough I just increased the size of the descrip and name arrays and the whole file is now printing to the screen. So that takes care of that.