CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++arraysfile
Gorav Soni
Gorav Soni

Reputation: 9

Reading data from a text file into a 2D array when data is inconsistent in C++

I was told to use a 2D array that reads all the contents of file below and stores it in a 2D array. Here is the file:

People often say that motivation doesn  t last   Well   neither does bathing that s why we recommend it daily   Ziglar
Someday is not a day of the week      Denise Brennan  Nelson
Hire character   Train skill      Peter Schutz
Your time is limited   so don t waste it living someone else s life      Steve Jobs
Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman      not the attitude of the prospect      W   Clement Stone
Everyone lives by selling something      Robert Louis Stevenson
If you are not taking care of your customer   your competitor will      Bob Hooey
The golden rule for every businessman is this: Put yourself in your customer s place      Orison Swett Marden
If you cannot do great things do small things in a great way    Napoleon Hill

*above is a text file containing data

The file has lots of random spaces but I can just use cin to ignore them. The part I am confused about is that each row has different amount of columns to process so I can't simply use a nested for-loop.

At the end I want to be able to cout << data[0][1]; and it should print out "often". Row is essentially the line number of the word.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 109

Answers (1)

Ayro
Ayro

Reputation: 42

You can use getline and then stringstream to read the words.

#include <fstream>
#include <sstream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main() {
    ifstream input;
    string line;
    string word;
    string data[3][10]; //You need to dynamically allocate memory if you don't know the size of your input. I am doing this to keep it short

    input.open("input.txt");

    int i = 0;
    while(getline(input, line)) { //Reading file line by line until the end of file
        stringstream ss(line);
        int j = 0;
        while(ss) {
            ss >> word; //word will become the next string in your line (People, often, say...)
            data[i][j] = word;
            j++;
        }
        i++;
    }

    return 0;
}

And you will get

cout << data[0][0] -> "People"
cout << data[0][1] -> "often"
.
.
etc.

Upvotes: 1

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