C++: cin with white spaces to strings without getline function

Question

I am in the middle of a college project which kind of looks like a students' database. Each line of the text file follows this "model":

 age ; full_name ; avg

I need to read the text file and store everything in a vector of structs and I could do that if the name was only one word. Well, obviously, age is an int, avg is a double, but what about the full name? I can't just use file >> full_name;, with full_name being a string because it would stop reading to it once it gets to a whitespace. The getline() function would store everything in one place so I am not sure what to do.

Please share your knowlegde with this young mind x)

[Heavily related](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23047052/why-does-reading-a-record-struct-fields-from-stdistream-fail-and-how-can-i-fi). — πάντα ῥεῖ, Mar 23 '16 at 18:04
`std::getline` can use a custom delimiter, those `;` look like they might come in handy :) — melak47, Mar 23 '16 at 18:09
Very similar problem indeed. But I didn't understand what the solution was. I don't want to use more than one string for the name becase it can has a variable amount of words. Also, rearranging the file is not an option. — Daniel Marques, Mar 23 '16 at 18:10
@melak47 Thanks! I just checked the full syntax for it and I'll give it a try with the delimiter. — Daniel Marques, Mar 23 '16 at 18:15
@DanielMarques _"Very similar problem indeed. But I didn't understand what the solution was."_ There wasn't/isn't _the solution_, but [my answer for using delimited input](http://stackoverflow.com/a/23070803/1413395) goes best in the direction you need. — πάντα ῥεῖ, Mar 23 '16 at 18:23
Possible duplicate of [How can I read and parse CSV files in C++?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1120140/how-can-i-read-and-parse-csv-files-in-c?s=1|3.1427) — πάντα ῥεῖ, Mar 23 '16 at 18:25
@melak47 I tried getline() with the delimiter but it didn't work. I'm sorry, I'm new, but can any of you please explain how can I do this with them? — Daniel Marques, Mar 23 '16 at 19:27

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 23 '16 at 20:55

As many others pointed out, you can use std::getline to read chars till a delimiter.

Consider this snippet of code as a starting point:

int age;
std::string name;
double average;

// ... Open the file which stores the data ... 

// then read every line. The loop stops if some of the reading operations fails
while ( input >> age  && 
        std::getline(input, name, ';')  &&        // consume the first ;
        std::getline(input, name, ';')  &&        // read the name
        input >> average ) {
    // do whatever you need with the data read
    cout << "age: " << age << " name: " << name << " average: " << average << '\n';
}

C++: cin with white spaces to strings without getline function

1 Answers1