find words in a text in c++

Question

Suppose there is a text file containing these in the fallowing style:

      name: natalie, sarah
      surname: parker
      age: 24
      contry: dubai

I want to get natalie and sarah as the name, parker as the surname and so on. After this, somewhere in my code I need variables name, surname, age (as natalie, sarah, parker, 24 etc..).

I think, first I need to read file and store it in an array and than parse it with using delimiters which are : " "(space) or ":" in order to parse <surname: parker> this one, and also use "," comma as a delimiter in order to parse <natalie, sarah>.

I could store the text in an array or use getline(textfile, size) for getting the lines, because I need exactly one line in each time. Which is the most suitable do you think? And how we can do the parsing?

Why dont you use a class or structure for storing the details — knightrider, Jan 27 '13 at 11:33
Looks like good ideas. Try them out and see how far you get. Then come back and ask about any specific problems you run into (if any). — Bo Persson, Jan 27 '13 at 11:34
Unless you have performance or size constraints you should use a well know format such as xml or a well established database like sql — Mikhail, Jan 27 '13 at 11:34
You don't have to be amazingly efficient unless you are Facebook with a billion names. Anything will work for a reasonable data size. — Bo Persson, Jan 27 '13 at 11:35

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:24

1

You are very close to the target. I just have a little bit suggestions:

Use std::map to store data from file
Use while loop to get each line from file, use split or boost::split the string by : to get key and value and store them in map.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:24

Community

1
1

answered Jan 27 '13 at 11:39

billz

44,644
9
83
100

Just to add, I'd also look into tokenizing: it'll come in handy for things like "name: natalie, sarah, ..., ...,". – paul23 Jan 27 '13 at 12:02

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 27 '13 at 11:57

1

Use regular expression to solver it easier. Pattern like this : "name:([\w,]+)surname(\w+)"

answered Jan 27 '13 at 11:57

Deeroad

11
1

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 27 '13 at 11:38

0

I could think of something like this (simplified; no error checking or optimization and such; this is untested, but should work):

std::ifstream file(myfile);
std::string line;

std::map<const std::string, std::string> dataset;

while (file >> line) {
    size_t var_start = line.find_first_not_of(" \t"); // get beginning of the variable name
    size_t var_end = line.find_first_of(":"); // get the end of the variable name
    if (var_start == std::string::npos || var_end == std::string::npos) // any not found?
        continue; // skip this line
    std::string var_name = line.substr(var_start, var_end - var_start); // get the variable name
    std::string var_value = line.substr(var_end + 1); // get the variable content

    // now do something, e.g. safe it
    dataset[var_name] = var_value;
}

answered Jan 27 '13 at 11:38

Mario

35,726
5
62
78

when I need to use dataset[var_name] how do I call it? – gozde umay Jan 27 '13 at 15:03
like dataset[0] or dataset[name]? – gozde umay Jan 27 '13 at 15:03
It's a map, the key is a `std::string`, so you'd use `dataset["name"]` for example, but that's really up to you (you could just compare `var_name` to literals and assign different variables). – Mario Jan 27 '13 at 16:03
how can I handle the "," part? name: natalia, sarah and I should get natalia and sarah seperately, how can I do that? – gozde umay Jan 28 '13 at 13:50
The same way, look for the position of the separator (e.g. using `find_first_of()`), then split it as I did above (e.g. using `substr()`). – Mario Jan 28 '13 at 18:59

find words in a text in c++

3 Answers3