I just need a little help with file parsing. We have to parse a file that has 6 string entries per row in the format:
"string1", "string2", "string3", "string4", "string5", "string6"
My instructor recently gave us a little piece of code as a "hint," and I'm supposed to use it. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to get it to work. Here's my file parsing function.
void parseData(ifstream &myFile, Book bookPtr[])
{
string bookInfo;
int start, end;
string bookData[6];
getline(myFile, bookInfo);
start = -2;
myFile.open("Book List.txt");
for (int j = 0; j < 6; j++)
{
start += 3;
end = bookInfo.find('"', start);
bookData[j] = bookInfo.substr(start, end-start);
start = end;
}
}
So I'm trying to read the 6 strings into an array of strings. Can someone please help walk me through the process?
start = -2;
for (int j = 0; j < 6; j++)
{
start += 3;
end = bookInfo.find('"', start);
bookData[j] = bookInfo.substr(start, end-start);
start = end;
}
So ", " is four characters. The leading closing quote is 3 characters behind the opening closing quote.
At entry to the loop start is pointing to the last closing quote. (On first entry to loop it is faked as -2 to be pointing to the closing quote of the imaginary "-1th" element.)
So we advance from the last closing quote to the following opening quote:
start += 3;
Then we use std::string::find to find the closing quote:
end = bookInfo.find('"', start);
The offset tells it to ignore all characters up to and including that position.
We then have the two quote positions, start..end, so we use substr to extract the string:
bookData[j] = bookInfo.substr(start, end-start);
And we then update start for the next loop to be the last closing quote:
start = end
Please, for your own sake, create a minimal example. This starts with a string like the line you gave as example and ends with the different parts in an array. Leave the loading from a file out for now, getline() seems to work for you, or? Then, do not declare every variable you might want to use at the beginning of a function. This is not ancient C, where you simply had to do that or introduce additional {} blocks. There is another thing odd, and that is the Book bookPtr[]. This is indeed just a Book* bookPtr, i.e. you are not passing an array to a function but just a pointer. Don't fall for this misleading syntax, it's a lie! Anyway, you don't seem to be using that pointer to the object(s) of the unknown type anyway.
Concerning the splitting of a line into strings, one approach is to locate pairs of double quotes. Everything in between is one of the strings, everything without is irrelevant. The string class has a find() function which optionally takes a starting position. Starting position is always one behind the previously found position.
Your code above seems to assume that there is exactly one double quote, a comma, a space and another double quote that separates two strings. This isn't 100% clear, I would also be prepared for handling multiple spaces or no space at all. Also, is the comma guaranteed? Are the double quotes guaranteed? Anyway, keep it simple. Unless you get a better spec on the input, just assume that only the parts between the quotes is what differs.
Then, what exactly works and what doesn't? You need to ask more specific questions and give more detailed information. The code above doesn't look broken per se, although there are a few things a bit off. For example, you don't typically pass ifstreams to a function, but use the istream baseclass. In your case, you read a line from that file and then open another file using the same fstream object, which doesn't make sense to me, since you don't use it after that. If you only needed that stream locally, you would create and open it there (handling errors of course!) and pass in the filename as parameter only.
Related
I am facing a problem with reading and writing a string from and to a file respectively.
Purpose:
To enter a string into a text file as a complete sentence, read the string from the text file and separate all words that start from a vowel using a function and display them as a sentence. (The sentence just needs to consist of the words from the string that start with a vowel.)
Problem:
The code is working as intended but as i have used the getline() function to obtain the string from the txt file when i withdraw a substring from it, it includes the entire file after the vowel instead of just the word. I cannot understand how to make the substring only include words.
Code:
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <cstring>
using namespace std;
string vowels(string a)
{
int c=sizeof(a);
string b[c];
string d;
static int n;
for(int i=1;i<=c;i++)
{
if (a.find("a")!=-1)
{
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("a",n));
d+=b[i];
n=a.find("a")+1;
}
else if (a.find("e")!=-1)
{
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("e",n));
d+=b[i];
n=a.find("e")+1;
}
else if (a.find("i")!=-1)
{
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("i",n));
d+=b[i];
n=a.find("i")+1;
}
else if (a.find("o")!=-1)
{
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("o",n));
d+=b[i];
n=a.find("o")+1;
}
else if (a.find("u")!=-1)
{
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("u",n));
d+=b[i];
n=a.find("u")+1;
}
}
return d;
}
int main()
{
string input,lne,e;
ofstream file("output.txt", ios::app);
cout<<"Please input text for text file input: ";
getline(cin,input);
file << input;
file.close();
ifstream myfile("output.txt");
getline(myfile,lne);
e=vowels(lne);
cout<<endl<<"Text inside file reads: ";
cout<<lne;
cout<<endl;
cout<<e<<endl;
system("pause");
myfile.close();
return 0;
}
I haven't read your code VERY carefully, but several things stand out:
Look up find_first_of - it'll simplify your code A LOT.
sizeof(a) certainly doesn't do what you think it does [unless you think it gives you the size of the std::string class type - which makes it rather strange as a use-case, why not use either 12 or 24?]
find (and find_first_of), technically speaking, doesn't return -1 when the function isn't finding what you want. It returns std::string::npos [which may appear to be -1, but a) is not guaranteed to be, and b) is unsingned so can't be negative].
Your program only reads one line.
x.substr(n) will give you the string of x from position n - is that what you want?
Don't repeat find, use p = x.find("X"); and then do x.substr(p) [assuming that is what you want].
There are various problems with your code.
int c = sizeof( a );
This is the number of bytes that a string takes up in memory. And you certainly don't want to create an array of this many strings as it makes no sense for what you're trying to achieve. Don't do this to yourself. You're only copying one string inside the loop, all you need is one string and you already have string d.
To get the actual size of a string, you have to call
str.size()
The string.substr(..) has a couple overloads, one of them takes only one argument, an index. This will return sub string starting at that index in the original string. (The string starting at the vowel all the way through to the end of the string)
What you are maybe looking for is the overload that takes two arguments, the start index (beginning of the word and the end of the word).
The string input will not take the newline that you enter to flush cin. And then you add it to the file in append mode, so after running the program a few times your file is a huge one-liner. Did you really intend to do this?
Maybe you should explicitly add a new line to the file after entering the input. Something like file << std::endl;
Also, the conditions in the ifs
if (a.find("a")!=-1)
Don't match what you do next,
b[i]=a.substr(a.find("a",n));
Then you use a static int,
static int n;
This is bad, because this function will only work once. You're lucky that static initializes its values to zero, but you should always initialize explicitly. In your case, you don't need this to be static.
Finally: "so i was unsure of how many loops to run"
When you don't know how many loops you have to run, then a for loop is not adequate.
You should use a while loop or a do while.
You shouldn't try to learn C++ by guessing, because that's what it looks like you're doing. You're trying to do more than you know and making some very silly mistakes. Find a good book to learn from, or at the very least google the functions you're using to see what they do and how to use them properly. (ie: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/string/substr/ )
Here's a list of books from stackoverflow's FAQ: The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List
The last thing is about finding vowels. When you find a vowel, you have to make sure it's at the beginning of a word. Then you want to read it until the word ends, that is when you find a character that is not part of a word. (a whitespace, certain punctuation, ... ) This should mark the beginning and end of the word.
I am a computer science student, an so do not have much experience with the C++ language (considering it is my first semester using this language,) or coding for that matter.
I was given an assignment to read integers from a text file in the simple form of:
19 3 -2 9 14 4
5 -9 -10 3
.
.
.
This sent me of on a journey to understand I/O operators better, since I am required to do certain things with this stream (duh.)
I was looking everywhere and could not find a simple explanation as to how does the extract>> operator works internally. Let me clarify my question:
I know that the extractor>> operator would extract one continues element until it hits space, tab, or newline. What I try to figure out is, where would the pointer(?) or read-location(?) be AFTER it extracts an element. Will it be on the last char of the element just removed or was it removed and therefore gone? will it be on the space/tab/'\n' character itself? Perhaps the beginning of the next element to extract?
I hope I was clear enough. I lack all the appropriate jargon to describe my problem clearer.
Here is why I need to know this: (in case anyone is wondering...)
One of the requirements is to sum all integers in each line separately.
I have created a loop to extract all integers one-by-one until it reaches the end of the file. However, I soon learned that the extract>> operator ignores space/tab/newline. What I want to try is to extract>> an element, and then use inputFile.get() to get the space/tab/newline. Then, if it's a newline, do what I gotta do.
This will only work if the stream pointer will be in a good position to extract the space/tab/newline after the last extraction>>.
In my previous question, I tried to solve it using getline() and an sstring.
SOLUTION:
For the sake of answering my specific question, of how operator>> works, I had to accept Ben Voigt's answer as the best one.
I have used the other solutions suggested here (using an sstring for each line) and they did work! (you can see it in my previous question's link) However, I implemented another solution using Ben's answer and it also worked:
.
.
.
if(readFile.is_open()) {
while (readFile >> newInput) {
char isNewLine = readFile.get(); //get() the next char after extraction
if(isNewLine == '\n') //This is just a test!
cout << isNewLine; //If it's a newline, feed a newline.
else
cout << "X" << isNewLine; //Else, show X & feed a space or tab
lineSum += newInput;
allSum += newInput;
intCounter++;
minInt = min(minInt, newInput);
maxInt = max(maxInt, newInput);
if(isNewLine == '\n') {
lineCounter++;
statFile << "The sum of line " << lineCounter
<< " is: " << lineSum << endl;
lineSum = 0;
}
}
.
.
.
With no regards to my numerical values, the form is correct! Both spaces and '\n's were catched:
Thank you Ben Voigt :)
Nonetheless, this solution is very format dependent and is very fragile. If any of the lines has anything else before '\n' (like space or tab), the code will miss the newline char. Therefore, the other solution, using getline() and sstrings, is much more reliable.
After extraction, the stream pointer will be placed on the whitespace that caused extraction to terminate (or other illegal character, in which case the failbit will also be set).
This doesn't really matter though, since you aren't responsible for skipping over that whitespace. The next extraction will ignore whitespaces until it finds valid data.
In summary:
leading whitespace is ignored
trailing whitespace is left in the stream
There's also the noskipws modifier which can be used to change the default behavior.
The operator>> leaves the current position in the file one
character beyond the last character extracted (which may be at
end of file). Which doesn't necessarily help with your problem;
there can be spaces or tabs after the last value in a line. You
could skip forward reading each character and checking whether
it is a white space other than '\n', but a far more idiomatic
way of reading line oriented input is to use std::getline to
read the line, then initialize an std::istringstream to
extract the integers from the line:
std::string line;
while ( std::getline( source, line ) ) {
std::istringstream values( line );
// ...
}
This also ensures that in case of a format error in the line,
the error state of the main input is unaffected, and you can
continue with the next line.
According to cppreference.com the standard operator>> delegates the work to std::num_get::get. This takes an input iterator. One of the properties of an input iterator is that you can dereference it multiple times without advancing it. Thus when a non-numeric character is detected, the iterator will be left pointing to that character.
In general, the behavior of an istream is not set in stone. There exist multiple flags to change how any istream behaves, which you can read about here. In general, you should not really care where the internal pointer is; that's why you are using a stream in the first place. Otherwise you'd just dump the whole file into a string or equivalent and manually inspect it.
Anyway, going back to your problem, a possible approach is to use the getline method provided by istream to extract a string. From the string, you can either manually read it, or convert it into a stringstream and extract tokens from there.
Example:
std::ifstream ifs("myFile");
std::string str;
while ( std::getline(ifs, str) ) {
std::stringstream ss( str );
double sum = 0.0, value;
while ( ss >> value ) sum += value;
// Process sum
}
I have a small program, that is meant to copy a small phrase from a file, but it appears that I am either misinformed as to how seekg() works, or there is a problem in my code preventing the function from working as expected.
The text file contains:
//Intro
previouslyNoted=false
The code is meant to copy the word "false" into a string
std::fstream stats("text.txt", std::ios::out | std::ios::in);
//String that will hold the contents of the file
std::string statsStr = "";
//Integer to hold the index of the phrase we want to extract
int index = 0;
//COPY CONTENTS OF FILE TO STRING
while (!stats.eof())
{
static std::string tempString;
stats >> tempString;
statsStr += tempString + " ";
}
//FIND AND COPY PHRASE
index = statsStr.find("previouslyNoted="); //index is equal to 8
//Place the get pointer where "false" is expected to be
stats.seekg(index + strlen("previouslyNoted=")); //get pointer is placed at 24th index
//Copy phrase
stats >> previouslyNotedStr;
//Output phrase
std::cout << previouslyNotedStr << std::endl;
But for whatever reason, the program outputs:
=false
What I expected to happen:
I believe that I placed the get pointer at the 24th index of the file, which is where the phrase "false" begins. Then the program would've inputted from that index onward until a space character would have been met, or the end of the file would have been met.
What actually happened:
For whatever reason, the get pointer started an index before expected. And I'm not sure as to why. An explanation as to what is going wrong/what I'm doing wrong would be much appreciated.
Also, I do understand that I could simply make previouslyNotedStr a substring of statsStr, starting from where I wish, and I've already tried that with success. I'm really just experimenting here.
The VisualC++ tag means you are on windows. On Windows the end of line takes two characters (\r\n). When you read the file in a string at a time, this end-of-line sequence is treated as a delimiter and you replace it with a single space character.
Therefore after you read the file you statsStr does not match the contents of the file. Every where there is a new line in the file you have replaced two characters with one. Hence when you use seekg to position yourself in the file based on numbers you got from the statsStr string, you end up in the wrong place.
Even if you get the new line handling correct, you will still encounter problems if the file contains two or more consecutive white space characters, because these will be collapsed into a single space character by your read loop.
You are reading the file word by word. There are better methods:
while (getline(stats, statsSTr)
{
// An entire line is read into statsStr.
std::string::size_type posn = statsStr.find("previouslyNoted=");
// ...
}
By reading entire text lines into a string, there is no need to reposition the file.
Also, there is a white-space issue when reading by word. This will affect where you think the text is in the file. For example, white space is skipped, and there is no telling how many spaces, newlines or tabs were skipped.
By the way, don't even think about replacing the text in the same file. Replacement of text only works if the replacement text has the same length as the original text in the file. Write to a new file instead.
Edit 1:
A better method is to declare your key strings as array. This helps with positioning pointers within a string:
static const char key_text[] = "previouslyNoted=";
while (getline(stats, statsStr))
{
std::string::size_type key_position = statsStr.find(key_text);
std::string::size_type value_position = key_position + sizeof(key_text) - 1; // for the nul terminator.
// value_position points to the character after the '='.
// ...
}
You may want to save programming type by making your data file conform to an existing format, such as INI or XML, and using appropriate libraries to parse them.
UPDATE: Yes, answered and solved. I also then managed to find the issue with the output that was the real problem I was having. I had thought the substring error was behind it, but I was wrong, as when that had been fixed, the output issue persisted. I found that it was a simple mix up in the calculations. I had been subtracting 726 instead of 762. I could've had this done hours ago... Lulz. That's all I can say... Lulz.
I am teaching myself C++ (with the tutorial from their website). I have jumped ahead time to time when I have needed to do something I cannot with what I have learned so far. Additionally, I wrote this relatively quickly. So, if my code looks inelegant or otherwise unacceptable at a professional level, please do excuse that for now. My only current purpose is to get this question answered.
This program takes each line of a text file I have. Note that the text file's lines look like this:
.123.456.789
It has 366 lines. The program I first wrote to deal with this had me input each of the three numbers for each line manually. As I'm sure you can imagine, that was extremely inefficient. This program's purpose is to take each number out of the text file and perform functions and output the results to another text file. It does this per line until it reaches the end of the file.
I have read up more on what could cause this error, but I cannot find the cause of it in my case. Here is the bit of the code that I believe to contain the cause of the problem:
int main()
{
double a;
double b;
double c;
double d;
double e;
string search; //The string for lines fetched from the text file
string conversion;
string searcha; //Characters 1-3 of search are inserted to this string.
string searchb; //Characters 5-7 of search are inserted to this string.
string searchc; //Characters 9-11 of search are inserted to this string.
string subsearch; //Used with the substring to fetch individual characters.
string empty;
fstream convfil;
convfil.open("/home/user/Documents/MPrograms/filename.txt", ios::in);
if (convfil.is_open())
{
while (convfil.good())
{
getline(convfil,search); //Fetch line from text file
searcha = empty;
searchb = empty;
searchc = empty;
/*From here to the end seems to be the problem.
I provided code from the beginning of the program
to make sure that if I were erring earlier in the code,
someone would be able to catch that.*/
for (int i=1; i<4; ++i)
{
subsearch = search.substr(i,1);
searcha.insert(searcha.length(),subsearch);
a = atof(searcha.c_str());
}
for (int i=5; i<8; ++i)
{
subsearch = search.substr(i,1);
searchb.insert(searchb.length(),subsearch);
b = atof(searchb.c_str());
}
for (int i=9; i<search.length(); ++i)
{
subsearch = search.substr(i,1);
searchc.insert(searchc.length(),subsearch);
c = atof(searchc.c_str());
}
I usually teach myself how to get around these issues when they come up by looking at references and problems other people may have had, but I couldn't find anything that helped me in this instance. I have tried numerous variations upon this, but as the issue has something to do with the substring and I couldn't get rid of the substring in any of these variations, all returned the same error and the same result in the output file.
This is a problem:
while (convfil.good()) {
getline(convfil,search); //Fetch line from text file
You test for failure before you do the operation that can fail. When getline does fail, you're already inside the loop.
As a result, your code tries to process an invalid record at the end.
Instead try
while (getline(convfil,search)) { //Fetch line from text file
or even
while (getline(convfil,search) && search.length() > 9) {
which will also stop without error if there's a blank line at the end of the file.
It's possible you are reading a blank line at the end of the file and trying to process it.
Test for an empty string before processing it.
I'm trying to split a c++ string into a number of substrings (NUM_LINES) each with the length of CHAR_PER_LINE.
for(int i = 0; i < NUM_LINES; i++) {
lines[i] = totalstring.substr(i*CHAR_PER_LINE,CHAR_PER_LINE);
}
Works fine as long as there's no special character in the string. Otherwise substr() gets me a string that isn't CHAR_PER_LINE characters long, but stops right before a special character and exits the loop.
Any hints?
ok, edit:
1) I'm definitely not reaching the end of my string. If my totalstring.length() is 1000 and I have a special character in the first line (that is the first CHAR_PER_LINE (30) chars of the string) the loop exits.
2) Special characters I had problems with are for instance 'ö' and '–' (the long one)
EDIT 2:
std::string text = "aaaabbbbccccdödd";
std::string line[4];
for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
line[i] = text.substr(i*4,4);
for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
std::cout << line[i] << "\n";
This example works. I get a '%' for the ö.
So the problem wasn't substr(). Sorry. I'm using Cairo to create a gui and it seems my Cairo output is causing the troubles, not substr().
How about a hint of what special characters you're talking about?
My guess is that you reached the end of the string.
The STL doesn't care of special characters. If there are multibyte sequences (i.e. UTF8), std::string treats them as a sequence of single one-byte-characters. If you need proper Unicode handling, do not use the builtin substr or length.
You can, however, use std::wstring (from your posting it isn't clear whether you're already using it, but I guess not) - it holds wchar_t characters - large enough for the native character set of your target platform.
What's happening is that you're running off the end of the string on the last line. It isn't exiting the loop after skipping characters. It exits the loop precisely when it should, and the last line contains the right number of characters, it's just that some of them are garbage so your diagnositic printout is showing that the line is short.
The only way the loop could be exited early is if an exception were thrown.