Left positioned?

[mszigeti]

Dear Guys,

I'm reading the C++ Data Structures book by Nell Dale and there is an expression like "left positioned". I copied some of the text. I tried to look after it, but no relevant answer. Thank You.

"Postconditions:

If no allowable characters are found, the empty string is returned; else, a string has been input according to the skip and charsAllowed parameters. inFile is left positioned following the last character read."

[chrisname]

That's incredibly ambiguous, but I think it means that the read/write position is not changed, if that makes sense. I guess you're reading as I did originally, with a hyphen (left-positioned, meaning "positioned leftwards").

[Duthomhas]

What it means is that each time you try to read from the file again it will continue to read EOF and leave the file pointer so that it will read EOF again. If you decide to write to the file at that position, you'll write after any existing data but before EOF.

To put it another way, where is the pipe in this text:

    Hello wo|rld!

Is it right-positioned at the 'o' or is it left-positioned at the 'r'?

Hope this helps.