Question: Basically what I want to do is to load a string from a file that is to be encoded as a json. 

The way I have achieved this is quite verbose for what should be a simple operation:

```
std::ifstream t(json_path);

std::string stringbuf = std::string(std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(t), std::istreambuf_iterator<char>());

boost::erase_all(stringbuf, "\t");

boost::erase_all(stringbuf, "\n");

boost::erase_all(stringbuf, " ");

```

Is there a briefer way to load a text file to a string and strip out the special characters?

Answer: 
You can use `std::getline` and erase/remove idiom with a lambda (or functor, if you don't have C++11 support), like

```
std::string string_buf(std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(t), {});
string_buf.erase(std::remove_if(string_buf.begin(), string_buf.end(), 
        [](char c) { return std::isspace(c);}), 
        string_buf.end()
);

```
You can also use `std::copy_if` and an inserting iterator to copy only the characters that you want instead of copying everything, shuffling the bytes around (e.g., `std::remove_if`), and removing the ones that you don't want.

```
#include <algorithm>
#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
#include <iterator>
#include <string>

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    std::string outbuf;
    std::ifstream ins(argv[1]);
    std::copy_if(std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(ins),
                 std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(),
                 std::back_insert_iterator<std::string>(outbuf),
                 [](char c) { return !std::isspace(c); });
    std::cout << outbuf << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

```