... section.¹

cin is just a special instance of a general input class called ifstream. The functions we describe here will work both for cin and for input file stream objects, which are covered later.

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...fstream.²

Well, okay, there are actually three. In addition to these two, there is also a more generalized one called fstream, which can be configured for both reading and writing. We will not cover the use of fstream.

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....open(filename); ³

The class ifstream also has a constructor which takes a filename and flags as arguments so that you can open the file as you create it if you prefer. e.g. ifstream file(filename);

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