C++ Primer, Fifth Edition

17.5.2. Unformatted Input/Output Operations

So far, our programs have used only formatted IO operations. The input and output operators (<< and >>) format the data they read or write according to the type being handled. The input operators ignore whitespace; the output operators apply padding, precision, and so on.

The library also provides a set of low-level operations that support unformatted IO. These operations let us deal with a stream as a sequence of uninterpreted bytes.

Single-Byte Operations

Several of the unformatted operations deal with a stream one byte at a time. These operations, which are described in Table 17.19, read rather than ignore whitespace. For example, we can use the unformatted IO operations get and put to read and write ...