About the fseek - ftell method, I should add that I saw this on http://www.cplusplus.c om/reference/clibrary/cstdio/ftell.html

"For text streams, the value is not guaranteed to be the exact number of bytes from the beginning of the file, but the value returned can still be used to restore the position indicator to this position using fseek."

Thus, the value is not guaranteed. So you might want to consider a...