Question

I have a program that need to get multiple cstrings. I current get one at a time and then ask if you want to input another word. I cannot find any simple way to get just one input with words divided be whitespace. i.e. “one two three” and save the the input in an array of cstrings.

typedef char cstring[20]; cstring myWords[50];

At the moment I am trying to use getline and save the input to a cstring and then I am trying to use the string.h library to manipulate it. Is that the right approach? How else could this be done?

Answer 1

If you really have to use c-style strings, you could use istream::getline, strtok and strcpy functions:

typedef char cstring[20];           // are you sure that 20 chars will be enough?
cstring myWords[50];
char line[2048];                    // what's the max length of line?
std::cin.getline(line, 2048);

int i = 0;
char* nextWord = strtok(line, " \t\r\n");
while (nextWord != NULL)
{
    strcpy(myWords[i++], nextWord);
    nextWord = strtok(NULL, " \t\r\n");
}

But much better would be to use std::string, std::getline, std::istringstream and >> operator instead:

using namespace std;
vector<string> myWords;

string line;
if (getline(cin, line))
{
    istringstream is(line);
    string word;
    while (is >> word)
        myWords.push_back(word);
}