Why does reading a record struct fields from std::istream fail, and how can I fix it?

Question

Suppose we have the following situation:

• A record struct is declared as follows

---

struct Person {
    unsigned int id;
    std::st         


        

Answer 1

When seeing such an input file, I think it is not a (new way) delimited file, but a good old fixed size fields one, like Fortran and Cobol programmers used to deal with. So I would parse it like that (note I separated forename and lastname) :

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

struct Person {
    unsigned int id;
    std::string forename;
    std::string lastname;
    uint8_t age;
    // ...
};

int main() {
    std::istream& ifs = std::ifstream("file.txt");
    std::vector persons;
    std::string line;
    int fieldsize[] = {8, 9, 9, 4};

    while(std::getline(ifs, line)) {
        Person person;
        int field = 0, start=0, last;
        std::stringstream fieldtxt;
        fieldtxt.str(line.substr(start, fieldsize[0]));
        fieldtxt >> person.id;
        start += fieldsize[0];
        person.forename=line.substr(start, fieldsize[1]);
        last = person.forename.find_last_not_of(' ') + 1;
        person.forename.erase(last);
        start += fieldsize[1];
        person.lastname=line.substr(start, fieldsize[2]);
        last = person.lastname.find_last_not_of(' ') + 1;
        person.lastname.erase(last);
        start += fieldsize[2];
        std::string a = line.substr(start, fieldsize[3]);
        fieldtxt.str(line.substr(start, fieldsize[3]));
        fieldtxt >> age;
        person.age = person.age;
        persons.push_back(person);
    }
    return 0;
}