Question

I have a text file with lines of text that have a string another string followed by up to 4 integers,
ex:

clear "clear water.png" 5 7
wet "wet water.png" 9 5 33 17
soft "soft rain falling.png" 

The only way I see it is:

read until space is found

set string to wet

read until double quote

read until second double quote

set second string to wet water.png

while not end of line

read until space

put string through string stream

push resulting integer into vector of int

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

This is the sort of task for which scanf and company truly shine.

char first_string[33], second_string[129];

sscanf(input_string, 
    "%32s%*[^\"]%*c%128[^\"]%*c %d %d %d %d", 
    first_string, 
    second_string, 
    &first_int, 
    &second_int,
    &third_int,
    &fourth_int);

You probably want to do that in an if statement so you can test the return value, to tell you how many of those fields converted (e.g., so you know how many integers you read at the end).

Edit: perhaps some explanation would be helpful. Let’s dissect that:

%32s reads a string to the first white-space (or 32 characters, whichever comes first).
%*[^\”] ignores input up to the first ".
%*c ignores one more byte of input (the quote itself)
%128[^\”] reads the string in the quote (i.e., up to the next quote character).
%*c Ignores the closing quote
%d Reads an int (which we’ve done four times).

The space before each %d is really unnecessary — it’ll skip whitespace, but without the space, %d will skip leading whitespace anyway. I’ve included them purely to make it a little more readable.