I need to read the whole content of a binary file and pass it to my method that receives as input a char array. I have a doubt about casting:
infile.open(argv[1], std::ios::binary);
infile.seekg(0, std::ios::end);
size_t file_size_in_byte = infile.tellg();
std::vector<char> data;
data.resize(file_size_in_byte);
infile.seekg(0, std::ios::beg);
infile.read(&data[0], file_size_in_byte);
How can I cast the vector to a char array now without having security memory errors?
&data[0] is actually your cast. As long as your vector doesn't go out of scope, you don't free that pointer don't go past file_size_in_byte / data.size(). you can safely read through it. like:
char* data_ptr = &data[0];
for(int i = 0; i < file_size_in_byte; i++)
{
// do something with data_ptr[i]
}
or pass it to a function as in:
char* data_ptr = &data[0];
process_file_data(data_ptr, data.size());
Or, as grizzly mentioned on the comment below, simply use: char * data_ptr = data.data();
char * data_ptr = data.data();