Thinking In C++. Volume 2: Practical Programming

Here’s a program that creates a file of test data in binary form (using write( )) and a second file in ASCII form using the DataPoint inserter. You can also print it out to the screen, but it’s easier to inspect in file form^.

//: C04:Datagen.cpp

// Test data generator

//{L} DataLogger

#include

#include

#include

#include "../require.h"

#include "DataLogger.h"

using namespace std;

int main() {

  ofstream data("data.txt");

  assure(data, "data.txt");

  ofstream bindata("data.bin", ios::binary);

  assure(bindata, "data.bin");

  time_t timer;

  Coord lat(45,20,31);

  Coord lon(22,34,18);

  // Seed random number generator:

  srand(time(&timer));

  for(int i = 0; i < 100; i++, timer += 55) {

    // Zero to 199 meters:

    double newdepth  = rand() % 200;

    double fraction = rand() % 100 + 1;

    newdepth += 1.0 / fraction;

    double newtemp = 150 + rand()%200; // Kelvin

    fraction = rand() % 100 + 1;

    newtemp += 1.0 / fraction;

    const DataPoint d(timer, Coord(45,20,31),

       Coord(22,34,18), newdepth,

       newtemp);

    data << d << endl;

    bindata.write(reinterpret_cast(&d),

   sizeof(d));

  }

} ///:~

The file data.txt is created in the ordinary way as an ASCII file, but data.bin has the flag ios::binary to tell the constructor to set it up as a binary file. To illustrate the formatting used for the text file, here is the first line of data.txt (the line wraps because it’s longer than this page will allow):^.

07\28\2003 12:54:40 Lat:45*20'31", Long:22*34'18", depth:  16.0164, temp: 242.0122

The Standard C library function time( ) updates the time_t value its argument points to with an encoding of the current time, which on most platforms is the number of seconds elapsed since 00:00:00 GMT, January 1 1970 (the dawning of the age of Aquarius?). The current time is also a convenient way to seed the random number generator with the Standard C library function srand( ), as is done here^.

After this, the timer is incremented by 55 seconds to give an interesting interval between readings in this simulation^.

The latitude and longitude used are fixed values to indicate a set of readings at a single location. Both the depth and the temperature are generated with the Standard C library rand( ) function, which returns a pseudorandom number between zero and a platform-dependent constant, RAND_MAX, defined in (usually the value of the platform’s largest unsigned integer). To put this in a desired range, use the remainder operator % and the upper end of the range. These numbers are integral; to add a fractional part, a second call to rand( ) is made, and the value is inverted after adding one (to prevent divide-by-zero errors)^.

In effect, the data.bin file is being used as a container for the data in the program, even though the container exists on disk and not in RAM. To send the data out to the disk in binary form, write( ) is used. The first argument is the starting address of the source block—notice it must be cast to a char* because that’s what write( ) expects for narrow streams. The second argument is the number of characters to write, which in this case is the size of the DataPoint object (again, because we’re using narrow streams). Because no pointers are contained in DataPoint, there is no problem in writing the object to disk. If the object is more sophisticated, you must implement a scheme for serialization, which writes the data referred to by pointers and defines new pointers when read back in later. (We don’t talk about serialization in this volume—most vendor class libraries have some sort of serialization structure built into them.)^.

Verifying and viewing the data

To check the validity of the data stored in binary format, you can read it into memory with the read( ) member function for input streams, and compare it to the text file created earlier by Datagen.cpp. The following example just writes the formatted results to cout, but you can redirect this to a file and then use a file comparison utility to verify that it is identical to the original^.

//: C04:Datascan.cpp

// Test data generator

//{L} DataLogger

#include

#include

#include "DataLogger.h"

#include "../require.h"

using namespace std;

int main() {

  ifstream bindata("data.bin", ios::binary);

  assure(bindata, "data.bin");

  DataPoint d;

  while (bindata.read(reinterpret_cast(&d),

         sizeof d))

    cout << d << endl;

} ///:~

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