C++ – Do I need to manually close an ifstream

Here is how I understood not just what virtual functions are, but why they're required:

Let's say you have these two classes:

class Animal
{
    public:
        void eat() { std::cout << "I'm eating generic food."; }
};

class Cat : public Animal
{
    public:
        void eat() { std::cout << "I'm eating a rat."; }
};

In your main function:

Animal *animal = new Animal;
Cat *cat = new Cat;

animal->eat(); // Outputs: "I'm eating generic food."
cat->eat();    // Outputs: "I'm eating a rat."

So far so good, right? Animals eat generic food, cats eat rats, all without virtual.

Let's change it a little now so that eat() is called via an intermediate function (a trivial function just for this example):

// This can go at the top of the main.cpp file
void func(Animal *xyz) { xyz->eat(); }

Now our main function is:

Animal *animal = new Animal;
Cat *cat = new Cat;

func(animal); // Outputs: "I'm eating generic food."
func(cat);    // Outputs: "I'm eating generic food."

Uh oh... we passed a Cat into func(), but it won't eat rats. Should you overload func() so it takes a Cat*? If you have to derive more animals from Animal they would all need their own func().

The solution is to make eat() from the Animal class a virtual function:

class Animal
{
    public:
        virtual void eat() { std::cout << "I'm eating generic food."; }
};

class Cat : public Animal
{
    public:
        void eat() { std::cout << "I'm eating a rat."; }
};

Main:

func(animal); // Outputs: "I'm eating generic food."
func(cat);    // Outputs: "I'm eating a rat."

Done.

As Neil pointed out, "the C++ runtime should deal correctly with whatever the line ending convention is for your particular platform."

However, people do move text files between different platforms, so that is not good enough. Here is a function that handles all three line endings ("\r", "\n" and "\r\n"):

std::istream& safeGetline(std::istream& is, std::string& t)
{
    t.clear();

    // The characters in the stream are read one-by-one using a std::streambuf.
    // That is faster than reading them one-by-one using the std::istream.
    // Code that uses streambuf this way must be guarded by a sentry object.
    // The sentry object performs various tasks,
    // such as thread synchronization and updating the stream state.

    std::istream::sentry se(is, true);
    std::streambuf* sb = is.rdbuf();

    for(;;) {
        int c = sb->sbumpc();
        switch (c) {
        case '\n':
            return is;
        case '\r':
            if(sb->sgetc() == '\n')
                sb->sbumpc();
            return is;
        case std::streambuf::traits_type::eof():
            // Also handle the case when the last line has no line ending
            if(t.empty())
                is.setstate(std::ios::eofbit);
            return is;
        default:
            t += (char)c;
        }
    }
}

And here is a test program:

int main()
{
    std::string path = ...  // insert path to test file here

    std::ifstream ifs(path.c_str());
    if(!ifs) {
        std::cout << "Failed to open the file." << std::endl;
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    int n = 0;
    std::string t;
    while(!safeGetline(ifs, t).eof())
        ++n;
    std::cout << "The file contains " << n << " lines." << std::endl;
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}