Why won't this code open a file for output?

InFile("inputname", Probably shouldn't be quoted, I think its using the string inputname instead of the variable/ what the user entered, contrast with outputname, just first impression

In addition to mbrubeck's comment, stated more explicitly: You open a file, do NOT close it, and attempt to open it again. This is why your first "inputFile" needed quotes (it doesn't, it's just opening a different file.) This is why your outputFile failes to open--because it is already opened.

By the way, the code compiles runs fine for me once I fix the "inputName" bug and comment out the "open" calls. But you write to "cout" in a bunch of places where you probably want to write to outputFile instead.

You have these two lines in your code: fstream inFile(inputName, ios::in); inFile.open(inputName, ios::in);These are two different ways of writing the same thing. Both lines try to open the file. The second one fails because the file is already open. Instead of writing both of these lines, you should only use one or the other. Either do just this: fstream inFile(inputName, ios::in);or just this: fstream inFile; inFile.open(inputName, ios::in);but not both.

First thing is probably to check the permissions on the directory where the output file is - I apologize if that's too obvious. (It always used to drive me crazy when I'd lose something and my Mom would follow me around, asking if I had looked in completely obvious places that I had already checked.......)

fstream inFile; ofstream outFile; inFile.open(inputName, ios::in); if (!inFile) { cout << "Could not open file"; return 0; } outFile.open(outputName, ios::out); if (!outFile) { cout << "Could not open file.\n"; return 1; } Sorry for lack of indents. That will at least run for me; outputFile is 1 after the open. Not sure exactly what this is supposed to be doing but give it a shot. No idea how to explain whatever the bug was as I am really not a C++ programmer.

Should've mentioned that...without the "" around inputname, the program will not open the file to read from . And if I put "" around outputName, the program will create a file called outputName regardless of what the user types for the name of the output file. Weird, and since I'm a noob, I have no idea why that is.

after got access to a compiler, yeah, the double opening of the files is causing problems on input(after fixing the hardcoded string) & output, not that i parsed whats its supposed to be doing with a period (ascii 46). if you look at: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/io/basic_fstream/basic_fstream variety 2/note 3 or something like that it does the open when you pass a filename in on the constructor, and the double open does bad things. ps, to others, since it puzzled me: a side note, depending on the compiler(esp on linux) you might need to pass -std=c++11 so it compiles, since the fstream constructor being used relies on c++11 behavior to take a string and not just a char* pps. its 2015, c++11 shouldn't be special and new.

thank you all - you're correct; it's trying to open the file twice. correcting for that, I was able to get the program to succcessfully write to the file. HOWEVER, and a snippet of code follows here, it is writing the ASCII codes for each character rather than the character itself. I had included cout statements so that it would display to the screen as well, so I could see what it was doing. It displays to the screen exactly as it should, but not to the file: while (!inFile.eof()) { inFile.get(ch); if (ch == 46) { cout.put(ch); outFile << (ch); inFile.seekg(1L, ios::cur); inFile.get(ch); cout.put(toupper(ch)); outFile << (toupper(ch)); } else { cout.put(tolower(ch)); outFile << (tolower(ch)); } }