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Lately I've been asked to write a function that reads the binary file into the std::vector<BYTE> where BYTE is an unsigned char . Quite quickly I came with something like this: #include <fstream> #include <vector> typedef unsigned char BYTE; std::vector<BYTE> readFile(const char* filename) { // open the file: std::streampos fileSize; std::ifstream file(filename, std::ios::binary); // get its size: file.seekg(0, std::ios::end); fileSize = file.tellg(); file.seekg(0, std::ios::beg); // read the data: std::vector<BYTE> fileData(fileSize); file.read((char*) &fileData[0], fileSize); return fileData; } which seems to be unnecessarily complicated and the explicit cast to char* that I was forced to use while calling file.read doesn't make me feel any better about it. Another option is to use std::istreambuf_iterator : std::vector<BYTE> readFile(const char* filename) { // open the file: std::ifstream file(filename, std::ios::binary); // read the data: return std::vector<BYTE>((std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(file)), std::istreambuf_iterator<char>()); } which is pretty simple and short, but still I have to use the std::istreambuf_iterator<char> even when I'm reading into std::vector<unsigned char> . The last option that seems to be perfectly straightforward is to use std::basic_ifstream<BYTE> , which kinda expresses it explicitly that "I want an input file stream and I want to use it to read BYTE s" : std::vector<BYTE>

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