CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++csvfile-read
Monique
Monique

Reputation: 101

Reading specific elements from a CSV file in C++

I'm trying to create a reference program which I think will use an excel spreadsheet to hold information for reading only. I want the user to be able to select a topic from an option list and have the information in the appropriate cell be fed back to them. The program is being written in C++. My question is, how do I access specific cells from a spreadsheet from my program? I've researched it a little and I've seen that I want to save my file as a csv and use fscanf to read the contents, but I'm at a loss as to how I would do this part. I googled it and found this thread:

http://www.daniweb.com/software-development/cpp/threads/204808/parsing-a-csv-file-separated-by-semicolons

but I think it reads in all of the data from the CSV? From what I can tell anyways. And I only want to pull specific elements. Is that possible?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1715

Answers (2)

Steztric
Steztric

Reputation: 2942

Are you invoking the program from Excel? If you are, a little VBA goes a long way. You could always only export the cells of interest ready for your C++ program to read in.

Otherwise, other answers are correct. However, you don't need to load the entire file into memory at once. You can use std::fstream to open the file and read in each line of the file, parsing in the required information for each line.

Upvotes: 0

K-ballo
K-ballo

Reputation: 81349

If you only want specific elements, you would still have to parse all contents of the file until you reach those elements. You don't have to store values you don't need, but you do need to parse them to advance in the file.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions