What is basic_ios::clear?

[Catfish]

Hello everybody. The code below tries to read data from an empty file. I catch the exception but it reads basic_ios::clear.

What exactly does it mean? Thanks in advance.

I think I'm interpreting this the wrong way because I'd rather expect a human-readable error string.

#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
	std::ifstream fempty("emptyfile.txt"); // this file contains nothing
	fempty.exceptions(std::ifstream::badbit | std::ifstream::failbit);

	try {
		char whatever[80];
		fempty.read(whatever, 80);
	}
	catch (std::ifstream::failure &ex) {
		std::cout << ex.what() << std::endl;
		return EXIT_FAILURE;
	}

	return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

[z05DSL3A]

The actual message is implementor defined, but that is an on odd message.

VS 2010 gives: ios_base::failbit set
This is at least a bit more informative.