Question

I’m attempting to read from a file a customer’s name, id, and loan information. The file is setup like this:

Williams, Bill
567382910
380.86
Davidson, Chad
435435435
400.00

Basically, every time I come to a new name, the information is going to be placed into a new object of the Customer class. My problem is, I’m trying to read from the file but I’m not sure how to overload the operator correctly to read only 3 lines from the file like I want to and put them in the right place.

I create the customer and open the file here:

Menu::Menu()
{
Customer C;
ifstream myFile;

myFile.open("customer.txt");
while (myFile.good())
{
  myFile >> C;
  custList.insertList(C);
}
}

This is just what I have in my .cpp file for a Menu class. Here is my code (the tiny bit that I know how to do) for the overloaded operator in my .cpp file for the Customer class.

istream& operator >> (istream& is, const Customer& cust)
{


}

I’m not sure how to only get the three lines and place them into their respective places inside of a Customer which are:

string name
string id
float loanamount

If anyone could help me out with this I’d really appreciate it.

Answer 1

Something like:

istream& operator >> (istream& is, Customer& cust) // Do not make customer const, you want to write to it!
{
    std::getline(is, cust.name); // getline from <string>
    is >> cust.id;
    is >> cust.loanAmount;
    is.ignore(1024, '\n'); // after reading the loanAmount, skip the trailing '\n'
    return is;
}

And here’s a working sample.