Question

I am working on an addressbook program, which reads data from a csv file of the following format

“last name”, “first name”, “nickname”, “email1”, “email2”, “phone1”, “phone2”,“address”, “website”, “birthday”, “notes”

I have read the file using getline in the following way:

   if(!input.fail())
     { 
       cout<<"File opened"<<endl;
       while(!input.eof())
       {

     getline(input,list) ; 
     contactlist.push_back(list);
     token=con.tokenize(list);  // NOT SURE IF I'm doing this right..am I?

        }
    }

and I’m using the tokenize member function of one of my classes contact, which looks like this

// member function reads in a string and tokenizes it
vector<string>Contact::tokenize(string line)
{
    int x = 0, y = 0,i=0;

string token;
vector<string>tokens;
while(x < line.length() && y < line.length())
{

    x = line.find_first_not_of(",", y);
    if(x >=0 && x < line.length())
    {

        y = line.find_first_of(",", x);
        token = line.substr(x, y-x);
        tokens.push_back(token);
        i++;
    }
}

}     

I now need to read the tokenized vector into a private vector member variable of another class and also need to read them into individual private variable of first name,lastname …note of class Contact.How do I read them into private vector member variable of a classtype and how would I call them in the member functions that would do evaluations such sorting adding a contact using the vectors.

and in total I have 2 header files Contact and addressbook with their respective implementation files and a main.

Also If you happen to have a clear concept accessing vectors of vectors/vectors within a vector like I have contactlist and token here in main

Answer 1

First you should separate your tokenize function from the contact class. It’s not in the responsibility of a contact to read a csv row. So extract this method to a new tokenizer class, just write a free tokenize function or use a solution like boost tokenizer.

With the generated tokens you can create a contact instance or pass it to another class.

struct Contact
{
  std::string firstName, lastName, email;

  /// Constructor.
  Contact(const std::string& firstName, 
      const std::string& lastName, 
      const std::string& email);
};

struct AnotherClass
{
  /// Constructor.
  AnotherClass(const std::vector<std::string>& tokens) :
     privateVector(tokens)  {}

  /// Construction with input iterators
  template<typename Iter>
  AnotherClass(Iter firstToken, Iter lastToken) :
    privateVector(firstToken, lastToken) {}

private:
  std::vector<std::string> privateVector;
};


int main()
{
  std::string line = ReadLine();
  std::vector<std::string> tokens = tokenize(line);

  Contact newContact(tokens[0], tokens[1], tokens[2]);

  AnotherClass wathever(begin(tokens), end(tokens));
}