How to change the delimiter in C++ [for csv] - c++

I'm trying to pass in data from a string into a .csv file, but I would like to know how i can change the delimiter from comma to any other char or even have no delimiters?
There will be commas in data thus other than stripping the commas, is it possible to remove delimiters/change the char of delimiters when writing to data.csv?
snippet of code:
string buffer, data;
ofstream oFile;
oFile.open("data.csv");
//some code to generate buffer
while (buffer.length() != 0){
size_t pos = buffer.find("end");
data = buffer.substr(0, pos);
buffer.erase(0, pos);
oFile << data;
oFile << "\n";
}
oFile.close();

I don't see where you output any comma in your code. Of course, when writing the file you can output any character as field separator.
The problem in your case may be with the code that reads the file. This is the place where you have to tell that the separator is something different than comma.
Maybe it helps to output your fields using double quotes? Then the reader may ignore the commas inside the quoted string.

Related

How to NOT use \n as delimiter in getline()

I'm trying to read in lines from a plain text file, but there are line breaks in the middle of sentences, so getline() reads until a line break as well as until a period. The text file looks like:
then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us. we could
a touched him nearly. well likely it was minutes and minutes that
there warnt a sound and we all there so close together. there was a
place on my ankle that got to itching but i dasnt scratch it.
My read-in code:
// read in sentences
while (file)
{
string s, record;
if (!getline( file, s )) break;
istringstream ss(s);
while (ss)
{
string s;
if (!getline(ss, s, '.')) break;
record = s;
if(record[0] == ' ')
record.erase(record.begin());
sentences.push_back(record);
}
}
// output sentences
for (vector<string>::size_type i = 0; i < sentences.size(); i++)
cout << sentences[i] << "[][][][]" << endl;
The purpose of the [ ][ ][ ][ ] was to check if linebreaks were used as delimiters and were not just being read into the string. The output would look like:
then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us.[][][][]
we could[][][][]
a touched him nearly.[][][][]
well likely it was minutes and minutes that[][][][]
there warnt a sound and we all there so close together.[][][][]
there was a[][][][]
place on my ankle that got to itching but i dasnt scratch it.[][][][]
What exactly is your question?
You're using getline() to read from the file stream with a newline delimiter, then parsing that line with a getline() using the istringstream is and a delimiter '.'. So of course you're getting your strings broken at both the new line and the '.'.
getdelim() works like getline(), except that a line delimiter other than newline can be specified as the delimiter argument. As with getline(), a delimiter character is not added if one was not present in the input before end of file was reached.
ssize_t getdelim(char **restrict lineptr, size_t *restrict n, int delimiter, FILE *restrict stream);

reading a "\n" string and writing to textfile?

I'm struggling with the following: I'm reading from an XML file the following std::stringstream
"sigma=0\nreset"
Which after some copying&processing is written to a text-file. And I was hoping for the following
sigma=0
reset
But sadly I only get
sigma=0\nreset
but when I directly stream
out << "sigma=0\nreset"
I get:
sigma=0
reset
I currently suspect that some qualifier of the "\n" is lost during the "copy&processing"... is this possible? How to track down a "\n" in the stream which isn't a linefeed anymore?
Thank you!
It's because the output functions doesn't handle the escape sequences like '\n', it's the compiler that does and then only for literals. The compiler knows nothing of the contents of strings, and so can not do the translation "\n" to newline when inside a string.
You have to parse the string itself, and write out newlines when appropriate.
Assuming that the std::stringstream actually contains what is equivalent to the literal "sigma=0\\nreset" (length = 14 characters) and not "sigma=0\nreset" (length = 13 characters), you'll have to replace it yourself. Doing so is not very difficult, either use boost's replace_all (http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_53_0/doc/html/boost/algorithm/replace_all.html), or std::string::find and std::string::replace:
std::stringstream inStream;
inStream.str ("sigma=0\\nreset");
std::string content = inStream.str();
size_t index = content.find("\\n",0);
while(index != std::string::npos)
{
content.replace(index, 2, "\n");
index = content.find("\\n",index);
}
std::cout << content << '\n';
Note: you may want to consider cases when the system end-of-line is something other than "\n"
If the std::stringstream actually contains "sigma=0\nreset", then please post the code that does the copying/processing and the writing to the text file.

ifstream get line change output from char to string

C++ ifstream get line change getline output from char to string
I got a text file.. so i read it and i do something like
char data[50];
readFile.open(filename.c_str());
while(readFile.good())
{
readFile.getline(data,50,',');
cout << data << endl;
}
My question is instead of creating a char with size 50 by the variable name data, can i get the getline to a string instead something like
string myData;
readFile.getline(myData,',');
My text file is something like this
Line2D, [3,2]
Line3D, [7,2,3]
I tried and the compiler say..
no matching function for getline(std::string&,char)
so is it possible to still break by delimiter, assign value to a string instead of a char.
Updates:
Using
while (std::getline(readFile, line))
{
std::cout << line << std::endl;
}
IT read line by line, but i wanna break the string into several delimiter, originally if using char i will specify the delimiter as the 3rd element which is
readFile.getline(data,50,',');
how do i do with string if i break /explode with delimiter comma , the one above. in line by line
Use std::getline():
std::string line;
while (std::getline(readFile, line, ','))
{
std::cout << line << std::endl;
}
Always check the result of read operations immediately otherwise the code will attempt to process the result of a failed read, as is the case with the posted code.
Though it is possible to specify a different delimiter in getline() it could mistakenly process two invalid lines as a single valid line. Recommend retrieving each line in full and then split the line. A useful utility for splitting lines is boost::split().

C++ fstream: how to know size of string when reading?

...as someone may remember, I'm still stuck on C++ strings. Ok, I can write a string to a file using a fstream as follows
outStream.write((char *) s.c_str(), s.size());
When I want to read that string, I can do
inStream.read((char *) s.c_str(), s.size());
Everything works as expected. The problem is: if I change the length of my string after writing it to a file and before reading it again, printing that string won't bring me back my original string but a shorter/longer one. So: if I have to store many strings on a file, how can I know their size when reading it back?
Thanks a lot!
You shouldn’t be using the unformatted I/O functions (read() and write()) if you just want to write ordinary human-readable string data. Generally you only use those functions when you need to read and write compact binary data, which for a beginner is probably unnecessary. You can write ordinary lines of text instead:
std::string text = "This is some test data.";
{
std::ofstream file("data.txt");
file << text << '\n';
}
Then read them back with getline():
{
std::ifstream file("data.txt");
std::string line;
std::getline(file, line);
// line == text
}
You can also use the regular formatting operator >> to read, but when applied to string, it reads tokens (nonwhitespace characters separated by whitespace), not whole lines:
{
std::ifstream file("data.txt");
std::vector<std::string> words;
std::string word;
while (file >> word) {
words.push_back(word);
}
// words == {"This", "is", "some", "test", "data."}
}
All of the formatted I/O functions automatically handle memory management for you, so there is no need to worry about the length of your strings.
Although your writing solution is more or less acceptable, your reading solution is fundamentally flawed: it uses the internal storage of your old string as a character buffer for your new string, which is very, very bad (to put it mildly).
You should switch to a formatted way of reading and writing the streams, like this:
Writing:
outStream << s;
Reading:
inStream >> s;
This way you would not need to bother determining the lengths of your strings at all.
This code is different in that it stops at whitespace characters; you can use getline if you want to stop only at \n characters.
You can write the strings and write an additional 0 (null terminator) to the file. Then it will be easy to separate strings later. Also, you might want to read and write lines
outfile << string1 << endl;
getline(infile, string2, '\n');
If you want to use unformatted I/O your only real options are to either use a fixed size or to prepend the size somehow so you know how many characters to read. Otherwise, when using formatted I/O it somewhat depends on what your strings contain: if they can contain all viable characters, you would need to implement some sort of quoting mechanism. In simple cases, where strings consist e.g. of space-free sequence, you can just use formatted I/O and be sure to write a space after each string. If your strings don't contain some character useful as a quote, it is relatively easy to process quotes:
std::istream& quote(std::istream& out) {
char c;
if (in >> c && c != '"') {
in.setstate(std::ios_base::failbit;
}
}
out << '"' << string << "'";
std::getline(in >> std::ws >> quote, string, '"');
Obviously, you might want to bundle this functionality a class.

How to read a word into a string ignoring a certain character

I am reading a text file which contains a word with a punctuation mark on it and I would like to read this word into a string without the punctuation marks.
For example, a word may be " Hello, "
I would like the string to get " Hello " (without the comma). How can I do that in C++ using ifstream libraries only.
Can I use the ignore function to ignore the last character?
Thank you in advance.
Try ifstream::get(Ch* p, streamsize n, Ch term).
An example:
char buffer[64];
std::cin.get(buffer, 64, ',');
// will read up to 64 characters until a ',' is found
// For the string "Hello," it would stream in "Hello"
If you need to be more robust than simply a comma, you'll need to post-process the string. The steps might be:
Read the stream into a string
Use string::find_first_of() to help "chunk" the words
Return the word as appropriate.
If I've misunderstood your question, please feel free to elaborate!
If you only want to ignore , then you can use getline.
const int MAX_LEN = 128;
ifstream file("data.txt");
char buffer[MAX_LEN];
while(file.getline(buffer,MAX_LEN,','))
{
cout<<buffer;
}
EDIT: This uses std::string and does away with MAX_LEN
ifstream file("data.txt");
string string_buffer;
while(getline(file,string_buffer,','))
{
cout<<string_buffer;
}
One way would be to use the Boost String Algorithms library. There are several "replace" functions that can be used to replace (or remove) specific characters or strings in strings.
You can also use the Boost Tokenizer library for splitting the string into words after you have removed the punctuation marks.