.\" This is a wxWidgets manpage page generated from the XML docs .TH wxTextFile 3wx 2005-02-15 "wxWidgets" "wxWidgets class documentation" .SH NAME wxTextFile \- Class for working with text files as with arrays of lines .SH DESCRIPTION The wxTextFile is a simple class which allows to work with text files on line by line basis. It also understands the differences in line termination characters under different platforms and will not do anything bad to files with "non native" line termination sequences - in fact, it can be also used to modify the text files and change the line termination characters from one type (say DOS) to another (say Unix). One word of warning: the class is not at all optimized for big files and thus it will load the file entirely into memory when opened. Of course, you should not work in this way with large files (as an estimation, anything over 1 Megabyte is surely too big for this class). On the other hand, it is not a serious limitation for small files like configuration files or program sources which are well handled by wxTextFile. The typical things you may do with wxTextFile in order are: Create and open it: this is done with either Create or Open function which opens the file (name may be specified either as the argument to these functions or in the constructor), reads its contents in memory (in the case of Open() ) and closes it. Work with the lines in the file: this may be done either with "direct access" functions like GetLineCount and GetLine ( operator[] does exactly the same but looks more like array addressing) or with "sequential access" functions which include GetFirstLine / GetNextLine and also GetLastLine / GetPrevLine . For the sequential access functions the current line number is maintained: it is returned by GetCurrentLine and may be changed with GoToLine . Add/remove lines to the file: AddLine and InsertLine add new lines while RemoveLine deletes the existing ones. Clear resets the file to empty. Save your changes: notice that the changes you make to the file will not be saved automatically; calling Close or doing nothing discards them! To save the changes you must explicitly call Write - here, you may also change the line termination type if you wish. .SH "PARENTS" .SH "INCLUDE FILES" wx/textfile.h .SH MEMBERS .SS wxTextFile () Default constructor, use Create or Open with a file name parameter to initialize the object. .SS wxTextFile (const wxString& strFile) Constructor does not load the file into memory, use Open() to do it. .SS ~wxTextFile () Destructor does nothing. .SS void AddLine (const wxString& strwxTextFileType type = typeDefault) Adds a line to the end of file. .SS bool Close () Closes the file and frees memory, losing all changes . Use Write() if you want to save them. .SS bool Create () .SS bool Create (const wxString& strFile) Creates the file with the given name or the name which was given in the constructor . The array of file lines is initially empty. It will fail if the file already exists, Open should be used in this case. .SS bool Exists () Return true if file exists - the name of the file should have been specified in the constructor before calling Exists(). .SS bool IsOpened () Returns true if the file is currently opened. .SS size_t GetLineCount () Get the number of lines in the file. .SS wxString& GetLine (size_t n) Retrieves the line number n from the file. The returned line may be modified but you shouldn't add line terminator at the end - this will be done by wxTextFile. .SS wxString& operator[] (size_t n) The same as GetLine . .SS size_t GetCurrentLine () Returns the current line: it has meaning only when you're using GetFirstLine()/GetNextLine() functions, it doesn't get updated when you're using "direct access" functions like GetLine(). GetFirstLine() and GetLastLine() also change the value of the current line, as well as GoToLine(). .SS void GoToLine (size_t n) Changes the value returned by GetCurrentLine and used by GetFirstLine() / GetNextLine() . .SS bool Eof () Returns true if the current line is the last one. .SS static const char* GetEOL (wxTextFileType type = typeDefault) Get the line termination string corresponding to given constant. typeDefault is the value defined during the compilation and corresponds to the native format of the platform, i.e. it will be wxTextFileType_Dos under Windows, wxTextFileType_Unix under Unix (including Mac OS X when compiling with the Apple Developer Tools) and wxTextFileType_Mac under Mac OS (including Mac OS X when compiling with CodeWarrior). .SS wxString& GetFirstLine () This method together with GetNextLine() allows more "iterator-like" traversal of the list of lines, i.e. you may write something like: wxTextFile file; ... for ( str = file.GetFirstLine(); !file.Eof(); str = file.GetNextLine() ) { // do something with the current line in str } // do something with the last line in str .SS wxString& GetNextLine () Gets the next line (see GetFirstLine for the example). .SS wxString& GetPrevLine () Gets the previous line in the file. .SS wxString& GetLastLine () Gets the last line of the file. Together with GetPrevLine it allows to enumerate the lines in the file from the end to the beginning like this: wxTextFile file; ... for ( str = file.GetLastLine(); file.GetCurrentLine() > 0; str = file.GetPrevLine() ) { // do something with the current line in str } // do something with the first line in str .SS wxTextFileType GetLineType (size_t n) Get the type of the line (see also GetEOL ) .SS wxTextFileType GuessType () Guess the type of file (which is supposed to be opened). If sufficiently many lines of the file are in DOS/Unix/Mac format, the corresponding value will be returned. If the detection mechanism fails wxTextFileType_None is returned. .SS const char* GetName () Get the name of the file. .SS void InsertLine (const wxString& strsize_t nwxTextFileType type = typeDefault) Insert a line before the line number n . .SS bool Open (wxMBConv& conv = wxConvUTF8) .SS bool Open (const wxString& strFilewxMBConv& conv = wxConvUTF8) Open() opens the file with the given name or the name which was given in the constructor and also loads file in memory on success. It will fail if the file does not exist, Create should be used in this case. The conv argument is only meaningful in Unicode build of wxWidgets when it is used to convert the file to wide character representation. .SS void RemoveLine (size_t n) Delete line number n from the file. .SS void Clear () Delete all lines from the file, set current line number to 0. .SS bool Write (wxTextFileType typeNew = wxTextFileType_NonewxMBConv& conv = wxConvUTF8) Change the file on disk. The typeNew parameter allows you to change the file format (default argument means "don't change type") and may be used to convert, for example, DOS files to Unix. The conv argument is only meaningful in Unicode build of wxWidgets when it is used to convert all lines to multibyte representation before writing them them to physical file. Returns true if operation succeeded, false if it failed. .SH "SEE ALSO" wxFile .SH "AUTHORS" Documentation content by Julian Smart, Robert Roebling, Vadim Zeitlin, Robin Dunn, et al Conversion to manpage format by Arnout Engelen (http://bzzt.net), bugreports welcome.