Question

I have a scientific application for which I want to input initial values at run time. I have an option to get them from the command line, or to get them from an input file. Either of these options are input to a generic parser that uses strtod to return a linked list of initial values for each simulation run. I either use the command-line argument or getline() to read the values.

The question is, should I be rolling my own parser, or should I be using a parser-generator or some library? What is the standard method? This is the only data I will read at run time, and everything else is set at compile time (except for output files and a few other totally simple things).

Thanks,

Joel

Answer 1

Also check out strtof() for floats, strtod() for doubles.