Using C++ filestreams (fstream), how can you determine the size of a file?

I'm sure I've just missed this in the manual, but how do you determine the size of a file (in bytes) using C++'s istream class from the fstream header?

You can open the file using the ios::ate flag (and ios::binary flag), so the tellg() function will give you directly the file size:

ifstream file( "example.txt", ios::binary | ios::ate);
return file.tellg();

You can seek until the end, then compute the difference:

std::streampos fileSize( const char* filePath ){

	std::streampos fsize = 0;
	std::ifstream file( filePath, std::ios::binary );

	fsize = file.tellg();
	file.seekg( 0, std::ios::end );
	fsize = file.tellg() - fsize;
	file.close();

	return fsize;
}

Don't use tellg to determine the exact size of the file. The length determined by tellg will be larger than the number of characters can be read from the file.

From stackoverflow question tellg() function give wrong size of file? tellg does not report the size of the file, nor the offset from the beginning in bytes. It reports a token value which can later be used to seek to the same place, and nothing more. (It's not even guaranteed that you can convert the type to an integral type.). For Windows (and most non-Unix systems), in text mode, there is no direct and immediate mapping between what tellg returns and the number of bytes you must read to get to that position.

If it is important to know exactly how many bytes you can read, the only way of reliably doing so is by reading. You should be able to do this with something like:

#include <fstream>
#include <limits>

ifstream file;
file.open(name,std::ios::in|std::ios::binary);
file.ignore( std::numeric_limits<std::streamsize>::max() );
std::streamsize length = file.gcount();
file.clear();   //  Since ignore will have set eof.
file.seekg( 0, std::ios_base::beg );

Like this:

long begin, end;
ifstream myfile ("example.txt");
begin = myfile.tellg();
myfile.seekg (0, ios::end);
end = myfile.tellg();
myfile.close();
cout << "size: " << (end-begin) << " bytes." << endl;

Since C++17, we have std::filesystem::file_size. This doesn't strictly speaking use istream or fstream but is by far the most concise and correct way to read a file's size in standard C++.

#include <filesystem>
...
auto size = std::filesystem::file_size("example.txt");

I'm a novice, but this is my self taught way of doing it:

ifstream input_file("example.txt", ios::in | ios::binary)

streambuf* buf_ptr =  input_file.rdbuf(); //pointer to the stream buffer

input.get(); //extract one char from the stream, to activate the buffer
input.unget(); //put the character back to undo the get()

size_t file_size = buf_ptr->in_avail();
//a value of 0 will be returned if the stream was not activated, per line 3.