String Input

Perhaps you book hasn't reached std::string yet, but I usually find a combination of std::getline() and std::string works best for me. But it depends, if I were reading a file of arbitrary whitespace separated numbers, I would use operator>>().

I wouldn't use raw character arrays if it could be avoided.

Yes in fact my book did reach the string library but I forgot to mention it.
So it is best to use string accompanied with getline.

Thanks

No, it really does depend.

Files that are interesting to programs are usually formatted in particular ways. Some are line based, and getline() (often combined with re-parsing the line using std::stringstream) is a simple way to deal with such formats.

Some formats are free form, like XML. In this case, just read in a bunch of data at a time (maybe the entire file if possible) and do the parsing in memory. Obviously, for an XML file you would use an existing XML parsing library.

Many well known formats are binary, which means they have non-textual elements. These need routines for reading and writing to be written very carefully, taking care for such issues as data sizes and endianess.

My suggestion of getline() was motivated because many beginners start with simple interactive text formats. I think getline() is usually best for such programs.