Creating 2D String Vector from text file - c++

Question

I'm having slight trouble creating a 2D Vector of String that's created by reading values from a text file. I initially thought I needed to use an array. however I've come to realise that a vector would be much more suited to what I'm trying to achieve.
Here's my code so far:
I've initialised the vector globally, but haven't given it the number of rows or columns because I want that to be determined when we read the file:
vector<vector<string>> data;
Test data in the file called "test" currently looks like this:
test1 test2 test3
blue1 blue2 blue3
frog1 frog2 frog3
I then have a function that opens the file and attempts to copy over the strings from text.txt to the vector.
void createVector()
{
ifstream myReadFile;
myReadFile.open("text.txt");
while (!myReadFile.eof()) {
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++){
vector<string> tmpVec;
string tmpString;
for (int j = 0; j < 3; j++){
myReadFile >> tmpString;
tmpVec.push_back(tmpString);
}
data.push_back(tmpVec);
}
}
}
However, when I attempt to check the size of my vector in my main function, it returns the value '0'.
int main()
{
cout << data.size();
}
I think I just need a pair of fresh eyes to tell me where I'm going wrong. I feel like the issues lies within the createVector function, although I'm not 100% sure.
Thank you!

Answer 1

You should use std::getline to get the line of data first, then extract each string from the line and add to your vector. This avoids the while -- eof() issue that was pointed out in the comments.
Here is an example:
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <sstream>
typedef std::vector<std::string> StringArray;
std::vector<StringArray> data;
void createVector()
{
//...
std::string line, tempStr;
while (std::getline(myReadFile, line))
{
// add empty vector
data.push_back(StringArray());
// now parse the line
std::istringstream strm(line);
while (strm >> tempStr)
// add string to the last added vector
data.back().push_back(tempStr);
}
}
int main()
{
createVector();
std::cout << data.size();
}
Live Example