I'm new to C++ and having a bit of trouble understanding the whole reading a file stream thing.. any help would be appreciated... here's where i'm having trouble
I Have an array of structures like this; (no I'm not allowed to use string to store these things apparently, or vectors or any other more advanced thing I haven't covered)...
struct Staff
{
char title[TITLESIZE];
char firstName[NAMESIZE];
char familyName[NAMESIZE];
char position[POSSIZE];
char room[TITLESIZE];
char email[POSSIZE];
};
Then I have an array of these structure;
Staff record[MAXNOSTAFF];
The data is contained in a text file separated by tabs. However some fields may contain whitespace. Data Like below:
Dr Sherine ANTOUN Lecturer 4327 3.204 sherine_antoun@gmail.com
Here is what I have written in my code...
//function prototypes
bool getRecord (ifstream& infile, Staff dataAr[], bool& fileFound);
int main()
{
Staff record[MAXNOSTAFF];
bool fileFound;
ifstream infile;
getRecord(infile, record, fileFound); //function call
if (fileFound==true)
{
cerr <<"Exiting Program"<<endl;
exit(1);
}
return 0;
}
//function definitions
bool getRecord (ifstream& infile, Staff dataAr[], bool& fileFound)
{
infile.open("phonebook.txt");
if (infile)
{
fileFound = true;
cout << "File " <<PHONEBOOK<< " opened successfully.\n\n";
}
else if (!infile)
{
fileFound = false;
cerr << "Error! File could not be opened. \n";
}
while (infile.good())
{
for (int lineIndex=0; lineIndex<MAXNOSTAFF; lineIndex++)
for (int titleIndex=0; titleIndex<TITLESIZE; titleIndex++)
{
cin.getline(dataAr[lineIndex].title[titleIndex], MAXNOSTAFF, '/t');
}
}
//check it works properly
for (int k=0;k<10; k++)
{
for (int m=0; m<11; m++)
{
cout << k <<". Title is : "<<dataAr[k].title[m]<<endl;
}
}
infile.close();
return fileFound;
}
Any help would be greatly appreciated.. thank you
Since you can't use std::string
and std::vector
, sscanf()
may be your choice:
while (infile.good())
{
char line[BUF_SIZE];
for (int lineIndex=0; lineIndex<MAXNOSTAFF; lineIndex++)
{
infile.getline(line, BUF_SIZE);
sscanf(line, "%s %s %s %[^\t] %s %s", dataAr[lineIndex].title, dataAr[lineIndex].firstName, dataAr[lineIndex].familyName, dataAr[lineIndex].position, dataAr[lineIndex].room, dataAr[lineIndex].email);
}
}
Note the %[^\t]
format specifier, it will match every character that's not \t
(because of ^), so that the fileds that contain whitespace can be read correctly. I don't know which fields exactly contain whitespace, so I just write an example.
EDIT:
if std::string
and std::stirngstream
is allow to use, you can split the string after get a line from the file stream:
while (infile.good())
{
char line[BUF_SIZE];
for (int lineIndex=0; lineIndex<MAXNOSTAFF; lineIndex++)
{
infile.getline(line, BUF_SIZE);
stringstream ss(line);
std::string s;
getline(ss, s, '\t'); // get the first field
getline(ss, s, '\t'); // get the second field
// ...
}
}