Help with fstream.open();

[massdeletion101]

I'm a newbie at manipulating external files. Is there any way to specify a path to the file with C++? It thinks that the path in the file name string is filled with unrecognisable escape sequences. Here is the code for what I have so far:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
fstream filestream("test.txt");
string test = "test successful!";
filestream << test;
filestream.close();
return 0;
}

What's weird is that I created a text document of the same name in the same directory of the executable, yet when it runs it doesn't put anything into it, hence the want to know if I can specify a file path.

[Ganon11]

When using the general class fstream, you may have to specify that you want to use the file for output by including the ios::out value after the filename in the open command i.e.

filestream.open("test.txt", ios::out);

I haven't used fstream (instead I use ifstream and ofstream, more specific versions of fstream, which you may want to explore), so I'm not sure if this is correct.

As far as specifying the filepath, I assume you tried to open something like

filestream.open("C:\My Documents\Programming Stuff\test.txt");

at which point the compiler would complain about not recogning '\M' or '\P'. Simply replace each '\' by '\\' - the example would become:

filestream.open("C:\\My Documents\\Programming Stuff\\test.txt");

The escape character for a single backslash is two backslashes - if you don't include this in the filename, your compiler will think you are trying to make escape sequences rather than making a filename.