its probably because what you see in the ascii editor are not spaces at all. Many editors, such as Notepad will display non-printable characters as spaces. What makes you think that file contains spaces? binary files contains all sorts of stuff that are meaningless to ascii edits. If you realy want to see what is in the file, and you are on MS-Windows os, you can use debug.exe that is in the MS-Windows installation directory -- that program has been distrubuted with every M$ operating system since MS-DOS 1.0 over 20 years ago. It has a split screen. On the left side is the hex values of every byte in the file. The right side contains the ascii values where non-printable bytes are displayed as a '.' (period).

the reason I say they are spaces is because they part of the file that I am looking at is the ID3 tag of an MP3. In the ID3 tag, you can store information about an mp3 such as the artist, album, title, etc....

When I open the file in winamp I can see the space between "The Beatles" under the artist field, and I see it in my ASCII editor.

The >> operator strips the spaces. If you want to retain them use read() function.