readline in C++? - c++

Question

I have a text file that I need to read in to variables in my code. For example lets say the .txt file looks like:
John
Town
12
Mike
Village
22
where there is a pattern of name then address then age of multiple people. I found that with (`)
string line;
ifstream myfile ("example.txt");
if (myfile.is_open())
{
while ( getline (myfile,line) )
{
cout << line << '\n';
}
myfile.close();
}
I can print out each line of the text file, but how could I assign the text to a variable?
I remember in Java you could do something along the lines of
while(there is a next line){
name = something.readline();
address = something.readline();
age = something.readline();
//do something with variables i.e construct new object then
//re-loop to construct new object with next set of data
}
the trick was that after readline() was called it would then move down a line in the text file and then next variable would be assign to the text below and so on. How can I recreate this in C++?

Answer 1

When I do stuff like this, I like to structure my data into records and write a function to read each record rather like this:
// logically grouped data
struct record
{
std::string name;
std::string address;
unsigned age;
};
// function to read in one record
// returns std:ostream& so that the while() loop can check
// the stream to make sure the read was successful.
// Takes record as a reference to pass the data back out
// of the function
std::istream& read(std::istream& is, record& r)
{
std::getline(is, r.name);
std::getline(is, r.address);
is >> r.age >> std::ws;
return is;
}
int main()
{
std::ifstream myfile("example.txt");
record r;
while(read(myfile, r)) // while the read was a success
{
// do something with record here
std::cout << " name: " << r.name << '\n';
std::cout << "address: " << r.address << '\n';
std::cout << " age: " << r.age << '\n';
std::cout << '\n';
}
}