Converting txt file contents to char array

[Lindley]

        data.getline(getdata,sizeof(data));

Looks like a misuse of sizeof() to me. I don't know what you expect that to give you, but how much stack memory an fstream object takes up doesn't seem very relevant to the problem.

Why not just do it the easy way:

  ifstream in("test.txt", ios::binary);

  // get length of file
  in.seekg (0, ios::end);
  size_t length = is.tellg();
  in.seekg (0, ios::beg);

  // allocate memory
  vector<char> buffer(length+1,0);

  // read file
  in.read (&buffer[0],length);