C++ Read in file with only numbers (doubles) - c++

Question

I'm trying to read in a file that should contain only numbers in it. I can successfully read in the entire file if it meets that criteria, but if it so happened to have a letter in it, I need to return false with an error statement.
The problem is I'm finding it hard for my program to error when it finds this character. It can find it no problem, but when it does, it decides to just skip over it.
My code to read in the file and attempt to read in only numbers:
bool compute::Read (ifstream& stream)
{
double value;
string line;
int lineNumber = 1;
if (stream)
{
while (getline(stream, line))
{
lineNumber++;
istringstream strStream(line);
while (strStream >> value)
{
cout << value << endl;
}
}
}
return true;
}
The input file which I use for this is
70.5 61.2 A8 10.2
2
Notice that there is a non-number character in my input file. It should fail and return false at that point.
Currently, all it does is once it hits the "A", it simply returns to the next line, continuing the getline while loop.
Any help with this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

The stringstream does catch those errors, but you're doing nothing to stop the enclosing loop from continuing when an error is found. You need to tailor your main loop so that it stops when the stringstream finds an error, which you can't do if the stringstream is being reconstructed on each iteration. You should create a for() loop instead and construct the stringstream in the declaration part. And the condition to the loop should be "as long as the stringstream and stream do not catch an error". For example:
for (std::istringstream iss; iss && std::getline(stream, line);)
{
iss.clear();
iss.str(line);
while (iss >> value)
{
std::cout << value << '\n';
}
}
Futhermore, it doesn't look like you need to use std::getline() or std::istringstream if you just want to print each value. Just do:
while (stream >> value) {
std::cout << value << '\n';
}
The above will stop when it finds an invalid character for a double.

Answer 2

You need the code to stop streaming but return false if it hasn't yet reached the end of the "input".
One way, possibly not the most efficient but still one way, to do that is parse a word at a time.
If you read first into a std::string and if it works (so the string is not empty) create an istringstream from that string, or reuse an existing one, and try streaming that into a double value.
If that fails, you have an invalid character.
Of course you can read a line at a time from the file, then split that into words, so that you can output a meaningful error message showing what line the bad text was found.
The issue of reading straight into doubles is that the stream will fail when it reaches end of file.
However it is possible to workaround that too because the reason for failing has an error status which you can check, i.e. you can check if it eofbit is set. Although the f in eofbit stands for "file" it applies to any stream not just files.
Although this method may sound better than reading words into a string first, I prefer that method in normal circumstances because you want to be able to report the error so you'll want to print in the error what was read.