I get ASCII symbols from BMP header instead numbers

Question

I'm trying to get BITMAPFILEHEADER part from .bmp file. I expected to see some numbers, but have ASCII symbols. How to solve this problem?

std::string path;
std::ifstream file;

path = "C:\\Users\\user\\Desktop\\Emp.bmp";

file.open(path);

if (!file.is_open())
{
    std::cout << "ERROR";
}
else
{
    char fromfile[14];

    file.read(fromfile, 14);

    std::cout << fromfile;
    file.close();
}

I tried to translate ASCII output to HEX-symbols and I have correct data (It matches with HEX-editor data), but I can't understand why I get ASCII from program output

Answer 1

This line:

std::cout << fromfile;

Treats fromfile as if it was a null-terminated string, because it is an array of chars.

If you want to see the numeric value of the bytes, you can use:

for (auto const & c : fromfile)
{
    std::cout << static_cast<int>(c) << ", ";
}

If you want to see only positive values (since char can be signed), the loop body should be:

std::cout << static_cast<int>(static_cast<unsigned char>(c)) << ", ";

And if you want hex values replace it with:

std::cout << std::hex << static_cast<int>(static_cast<unsigned char>(c)) << ", ";

Another issue is that you open the file in text mode (the default), instead of opening it in binary mode which is more suited for your purpose:

//--------------vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv-
file.open(path, std::ios::binary);