I am having a hard time understand writing and reading files. i have read a lot of literature but i can't seem to find the answers i'm looking for.

some facts; lets say i am writing a file of 5 records in an array. each record has 3 elements. let say i write the file with each element as a string. now my question;

1. without knowing how the file was written (ie...string, int, char, double) or the name of the element (or the format of those elements), but i do know the number of records and what each element (but not the order of these elements) are. how can you read a file in a program and load it into an array?

2. i assume when the file is written some tags are attached to each element but just not displayed in the .dat file?

i wrote a file like this and this was the dat in the .dat file;

1111frank26354
9847tom37374
5343hank1324

etc.... is this how a program writes a file?

i hope i am making sense.

Try looking up fstream.

Here:
http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/files.html