C++ check if the last thing read from file was a number - c++

Question

this is quite a primitive problem, so I guess the solution shouldn't be hard, but I didn't find a way how to do it simply, neither have I summarized it to actually find it in the internet.So going to the question, I have a file of information like this:
1988 Godfather 3 33 42
1991 Dance with Wolves 3 35 43
1992 Silence of the lambs 3 33 44
And I have a requirement to put all the information in a data structure, so lets say it will be int year, string name and three more int types for numbers. But how do I know if the next thing I read is a number or not? I never know how long is the word.Thank you in advance for anyone who took their time with such a primitive problem. :)
EDIT: Don't consider movies with numbers in their title.

Answer 1

You're going to have some major issues when you go to try to parse other movies, like, Free Willy 2.
You might try instead to treat it as a std::stringstream and rely on the last three chunks being the data you're looking for rather than generalizing with a Regular Expression.

Answer 2

your best bet would be to use C++ regex
That would give you a more fine grained control over what you want to parse.
examples:
year -> \d{4}
word -> \w+
number->\d+

Answer 3

If you do not have control over the file format, you may want to do something along these lines (pseudo-process):
1) read in the line from the file
2) reverse the order of the "words" in the file
3) read in the 3 ints first
4) read in the rest of the stream as a string
4) reverse the "words" in the new string
5) read in the year
6) the remainder will be the movie title

Answer 4

Read every field as a string and then convert the appropriate string to integers.
1)initially
1983
GodFather
3
33
45
are all strings and stored in a vector of strings (vector<string>).
2)Then 1983(1st string is converted to integer using atoi) and last three strings are also converted to integers. Rest of the strings constitute the movie_name
Following code has been written under the assumption that input file has already been validated for the format.
// open the input file for reading
ifstream ifile(argv[1]);
string input_str;
//Read each line
while(getline(ifile,input_str)) {
stringstream sstr(input_str);
vector<string> strs;
string str;
while(sstr>>str)
strs.push_back(str);
//use the vector of strings to initialize the variables
// year, movie name and last three integers
unsigned int num_of_strs = strs.size();
//first string is year
int year = atoi(strs[0].c_str());
//last three strings are numbers
int one_num = atoi(strs[num_of_strs-3].c_str());
int two_num = atoi(strs[num_of_strs-2].c_str());
int three_num = atoi(strs[num_of_strs-1].c_str());
//rest correspond to movie name
string movie_name("");
//append the strings to form the movie_name
for(unsigned int i=1;i<num_of_strs-4;i++)
movie_name+=(strs[i]+string(" "));
movie_name+=strs[i];
IMHO Changing delimiters in the file from space to some other character like , or ; or : , will simplify the parsing significantly.
For example , if later on the data specifications change and instead of only last three , either last three or last four can be integers then the code above will need major refactoring.