Parsing text file in C++

Question

I have a text file that contains name, age, salary, hoursWorked, randomText and are filled with different delimiters.

Text file:

susan:25-2600,28[asd] mary:21-2200,38[asd] john:23-3400,46[asd] 

Instead of breaking them into individual strings using the code shown below:

string name,age,salary,hoursWorked,randomText; ifstream readFile("textfile.txt"); while(getline(readFile,line)) { stringstream iss(line); getline(iss, name, ':'); getline(iss, age, '-'); getline(iss, salary, ','); getline(iss, hoursWorked, '['); getline(iss, randomText, ']'); } readFile.close(); 

What are some better strategies other than coding it this way?

Side note

I declared all the variables to strings because of the getline() method.

Answer 1

I would create a class and define an input operator:

struct Person { std::string name; std::string age; std::string salary; std::string hoursWorked; std::string randomText; friend std::istream& operator>>(std::istream& str, Person& data) { std::string line; Person tmp; if (std::getline(str,line)) { std::stringstream iss(line); if ( std::getline(iss, tmp.name, ':') && std::getline(iss, tmp.age, '-') && std::getline(iss, tmp.salary, ',') && std::getline(iss, tmp.hoursWorked, '[') && std::getline(iss, tmp.randomText, ']')) { /* OK: All read operations worked */ data.swap(tmp); // C++03 as this answer was written a long time ago. } else { // One operation failed. // So set the state on the main stream // to indicate failure. str.setstate(std::ios::failbit); } } return str; } void swap(Person& other) throws() // C++03 as this answer was written a long time ago. { swap(name, other.name); swap(age, other.age); swap(salary, other.salary); swap(hoursWorked, other.hoursWorked); swap(randomText, other.randomText) } }; 

Now your code looks like this:

Person data; while(readFile >> data) { // Do Stuff } 

PS. I noticed you were using string and ifstream without the std::. This suggests you have using namespace std; in your code. Please don't do that. see Why is “using namespace std;” considered bad practice?

Don't explictly close() a file unless you are going to check that it worked (or are going the re-open). Prefer to let the destructor do the closing (that way it is exception safe). See: My C++ code involving an fstream failed review