In your programming journey, there will come a time when you’ll want to start working with real-world data. This kind of data is typically stored in files on disk. Since reading from files involves interacting with your operating system, it amounts to a rather complex task. In this article, we’ll look at C++ streams, file handling, and three different methods for reading data from a file into a C++ program. 

If you come from a high-level programming language like Python, reading a file into a program seems like a simple enough task. You open the file, read its contents and close it. Working with a file might take up one or two lines of your code. In C++, the workflow of reading a file is a bit more complex — there is the added step of reading to or from a stream object. To understand how our C++ programs interact with files, let us now take a look at the concept of streams in C++.