How to Read from a Text File, Character by Character in C++

You could try something like:

char ch;
fstream fin("file", fstream::in);
while (fin >> noskipws >> ch) {
    cout << ch; // Or whatever
}

@cnicutar and @Pete Becker have already pointed out the possibility of using noskipws/unsetting skipws to read a character at a time without skipping over white space characters in the input.

Another possibility would be to use an istreambuf_iterator to read the data. Along with this, I'd generally use a standard algorithm like std::transform to do the reading and processing.

Just for example, let's assume we wanted to do a Caesar-like cipher, copying from standard input to standard output, but adding 3 to every upper-case character, so A would become D, B could become E, etc. (and at the end, it would wrap around so XYZ converted to ABC.

If we were going to do that in C, we'd typically use a loop something like this:

int ch;
while (EOF != (ch = getchar())) {
    if (isupper(ch)) 
        ch = ((ch - 'A') +3) % 26 + 'A';
    putchar(ch);
}

To do the same thing in C++, I'd probably write the code more like this:

std::transform(std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(std::cin),
               std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(),
               std::ostreambuf_iterator<char>(std::cout),
               [](int ch) { return isupper(ch) ? ((ch - 'A') + 3) % 26 + 'A' : ch;});

Doing the job this way, you receive the consecutive characters as the values of the parameter passed to (in this case) the lambda function (though you could use an explicit functor instead of a lambda if you preferred).

To quote Bjarne Stroustrup:"The >> operator is intended for formatted input; that is, reading objects of an expected type and format. Where this is not desirable and we want to read charactes as characters and then examine them, we use the get() functions."

char c;
while (input.get(c))
{
    // do something with c
}

    //Variables
    char END_OF_FILE = '#';
    char singleCharacter;

    //Get a character from the input file
    inFile.get(singleCharacter);

    //Read the file until it reaches #
    //When read pointer reads the # it will exit loop
    //This requires that you have a # sign as last character in your text file

    while (singleCharacter != END_OF_FILE)
    {
         cout << singleCharacter;
         inFile.get(singleCharacter);
    }

   //If you need to store each character, declare a variable and store it
   //in the while loop.