Reading in only letters from a text file - c++

Question

I am trying to read in from a text file a poem that contains commas, spaces, periods, and newline character. I am trying to use getline to read in each separate word. I do not want to read in any of the commas, spaces, periods, or newline character. As I read in each word I am capitalizing each letter then calling my insert function to insert each word into a binary search tree as a separate node. I do not know the best way to separate each word. I have been able to separate each word by spaces but the commas, periods, and newline characters keep being read in.
Here is my text file:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Data Structures is the best,
You and I both know it is true.
The code I am using is this:
string inputFile;
cout << "What is the name of the text file?";
cin >> inputFile;
ifstream fin;
fin.open(inputFile);
//Input once
string input;
getline(fin, input, ' ');
for (int i = 0; i < input.length(); i++)
{
input[i] = toupper(input[i]);
}
//check for duplicates
if (tree.Find(input, tree.Current, tree.Parent) == true)
{
tree.Insert(input);
countNodes++;
countHeight = tree.Height(tree.Root);
}
Basically I am using the getline(fin,input, ' ') to read in my input.

Answer 1

I was able to figure out a solution. I was able to read in an entire line of code into the variable line, then I searched each letter of the word and only kept what was a letter and I stored that into word.Then, I was able to call my insert function to insert the Node into my tree.
const int MAXWORDSIZE = 50;
const int MAXLINESIZE = 1000;
char word[MAXWORDSIZE], line[MAXLINESIZE];
int lineIdx, wordIdx, lineLength;
//get a line
fin.getline(line, MAXLINESIZE - 1);
lineLength = strlen(line);
while (fin)
{
for (int lineIdx = 0; lineIdx < lineLength;)
{
//skip over non-alphas, and check for end of line null terminator
while (!isalpha(line[lineIdx]) && line[lineIdx] != '\0')
++lineIdx;
//make sure not at the end of the line
if (line[lineIdx] != '\0')
{
//copy alphas to word c-string
wordIdx = 0;
while (isalpha(line[lineIdx]))
{
word[wordIdx] = toupper(line[lineIdx]);
wordIdx++;
lineIdx++;
}
//make it a c-string with the null terminator
word[wordIdx] = '\0';
//THIS IS WHERE YOU WOULD INSERT INTO THE BST OR INCREMENT FREQUENCY COUNTER IN THE NODE
if (tree.Find(word) == false)
{
tree.Insert(word);
totalNodes++;
//output word
//cout << word << endl;
}
else
{
tree.Counter();
}
}

Answer 2

This is a good time for a technique I've posted a few times before: define a ctype facet that treats everything but letters as white space (searching for imbue will show several examples).
From there, it's a matter of std::transform with istream_iterators on the input side, a std::set for the output, and a lambda to capitalize the first letter.

Answer 3

You can make a custom getline function for multiple delimiters:
std::istream &getline(std::istream &is, std::string &str, std::string const& delims)
{
str.clear();
// the 3rd parameter type and the condition part on the right side of &&
// should be all that differs from std::getline
for(char c; is.get(c) && delims.find(c) == std::string::npos; )
str.push_back(c);
return is;
}
And use it:
getline(fin, input, " \n,.");

Answer 4

You can use std::regex to select your tokens
Depending on the size of your file you can read it either line by line or entirely in an std::string.
To read the file you can use :
std::ifstream t("file.txt");
std::string sin((std::istreambuf_iterator<char>(t)),
std::istreambuf_iterator<char>());
and this will do the matching for space separated string.
std::regex word_regex(",\\s]+");
auto what =
std::sregex_iterator(sin.begin(), sin.end(), word_regex);
auto wend = std::sregex_iterator();
std::vector<std::string> v;
for (;what!=wend ; wend) {
std::smatch match = *what;
V.push_back(match.str());
}
I think to separate tokens separated either by , space or new line you should use this regex : (,| \n| )[[:alpha:]].+ . I have not tested though and it might need you to check this out.