Question

I have been following this convention thus far:

std::string line;
while(std::getline(in,line)) 
{
    if(line.size() && line[0] =='#')
      continue;
    /* parse text*/
}

The obvious drawback is that comment may not begin at the first character, in the case of leading whitespace.

What is the good way to deal with this sort of a thing?

Answer 1

Simple enhancement: you may want to use line.find_first_not_of(” “) to get the first non-whitespace and then check if that is a ‘#’. That would also cover to the zero length case. Something like this fragment:

  found= line.find_first_not_of(" \t");

  if( found != string::npos)
  {
    if( line[found] == '#')
      continue;
  }

More info