Hi Luciano, You haven't plumbed up the facet, the locale, and/or the codecvt facilities for your new stream's base type. Some C++ compilers give you those things for char, and plumb char up to locale facilities provided by the OS (e.g., the LC_ALL environment variable). Most C++ compilers give you those things for char and wchar_t, and, again, plumb char and wchar_t up to locale facilities provided by the OS. I don't know of any C++ compilers that provide you those things for unsigned char, nor do I know of any OS that provides those facilities for unsigned char. Take a look at "Standard C++ IOStreams and Locales" by Angelika Langer and Klaus Kreft, for all the gory details. You'll be whipping up your own custom std::basic_ifstream<float> and std::basic_ifstream<MyBigStruct> in no time. HTH, --Eljay
