How to get characters from a file and display on console?

Question

I got this code from notes about file handling. From what I understand about this code, I want to get characters till x is reached in the file using this code. Why am I getting only the first character? If this code is incorrect, how should I alter the code to get characters till x is reached? Please help me understand this.<

#include<iostream>
#include<fstream>
#include<string.h>
#include<string>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
    char a = '-';
    do
    {

        ifstream obj("test.txt", ifstream::in);// in would mean import from txt to ram
       // cout << obj << endl;
        if (obj.good() && a != obj.peek())
        {
            a = obj.getline();
            cout << a << endl;
        }
        obj.close();
    } while (a != 'x');
    
    return 0;
}

Answer 1

a is a character and std::getline() returns an istream. Isn't there something wrong here? You cannot assign an istream to a char, so the code doesn't even compile.

You can simplify your code into this working example:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;
int main()
{
    ifstream obj("test.txt", ifstream::in);

    if (obj.good())
    {
        std::string line;
        while (std::getline(obj, line))
        {
            for (auto& i : line)
            {
                if (i == 'x') return 0;
                cout << i << endl;
            }
        }
    }
    obj.close();
    return 0;
}

test.txt:

This is
a
test fixle

Output:

T
h
i
s

i
s
a
t
e
s
t

f
i