C++ All-in-One For Dummies
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This following file has a general format (or protocol!). The text is easy because it can only be interpreted in one way — as text. Sooner or later, you may be reading a file that has this kind of information in it:

Hello there my favorite number is 13. When I go to the
store I buy 52 items each week, except on dates that
start with 2, in which case I buy 53 items.
Hello there my favorite number is 18. When I go to the
store I buy 72 items each week, except on dates that
start with 1, in which case I buy 73 items.
Hello there my favorite number is 10. When I go to the
store I buy 40 items each week, except on dates that
start with 2, in which case I buy 41 items.

However, the numbers could be interpreted as text (the characters 1 and 3 for example) or as a value (the number 13). How can you read in the numbers? One way is to read strings for each of the words and skip them. Here’s a sample piece of code that reads up to the first number, the favorite number:

ifstream infile("words.txt");
string skip;
for (int i=0; i<6; i++)
    infile >> skip;
int favorite;
infile >> favorite;

This code reads in six strings and just ignores them. You can see how you do this through a loop that counts from 0 up to but not including 6. (Ah, you gotta love computers. Most people would just count 1 to 6.)

Then, after you read the six strings that you just ignored, you finally read the favorite number as a number. Notice that the individual words use a variable of type string and the numeric value uses a variable of type int. You can then repeat the same process to get the remaining numbers.

About This Article

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About the book author:

John Mueller has produced 114 books and more than 600 articles on topics ranging from functional programming techniques to working with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Luca Massaron, a Google Developer Expert (GDE),??interprets big data and transforms it into smart data through simple and effective data mining and machine learning techniques.

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