Question

Suppose there is a text file containing these in the fallowing style:

      name: natalie, sarah
      surname: parker
      age: 24
      contry: dubai

I want to get natalie and sarah as the name, parker as the surname and so on. After this, somewhere in my code I need variables name, surname, age (as natalie, sarah, parker, 24 etc..).

I think, first I need to read file and store it in an array and than parse it with using delimiters which are : ” “(space) or “:” in order to parse <surname: parker> this one, and also use “,” comma as a delimiter in order to parse <natalie, sarah>.

I could store the text in an array or use getline(textfile, size) for getting the lines, because I need exactly one line in each time. Which is the most suitable do you think? And how we can do the parsing?

Answer 1

I could think of something like this (simplified; no error checking or optimization and such; this is untested, but should work):

std::ifstream file(myfile);
std::string line;

std::map<const std::string, std::string> dataset;

while (file >> line) {
    size_t var_start = line.find_first_not_of(" \t"); // get beginning of the variable name
    size_t var_end = line.find_first_of(":"); // get the end of the variable name
    if (var_start == std::string::npos || var_end == std::string::npos) // any not found?
        continue; // skip this line
    std::string var_name = line.substr(var_start, var_end - var_start); // get the variable name
    std::string var_value = line.substr(var_end + 1); // get the variable content

    // now do something, e.g. safe it
    dataset[var_name] = var_value;
}