How can I use non-default delimiters when reading a text file with std::fstream?

Question

In my C++ code, I want to read from a text file (*.txt) and tokenize every entry. More specifically, I want to be able to read individual words from a file, such as \"format

Answer 1

You can use

istream::getline(char* buffer, steamsize maxchars, char delim)

although this only supports a single delimiter. To further split the lines on your different delimiters, you could use

char* strtok(char* inString, const char* delims)  

which takes multiple delimeters. When you use strtok you only need to pass it the address of your buffer the first time - after that just pass in a null and it will give you the next token from the last one it gave you, returning a null pointer when there are no more.

EDIT: A specific implementation would be something like

char buffer[120]; //this size is dependent on what you expect the file to contain
while (!myIstream.eofbit) //I may have forgotten the exact syntax of the end bit
{
    myIstream.getline(buffer, 120); //using default delimiter of \n
    char* tokBuffer;
    tokBuffer = strtok(buffer, "'- ");
    while (tokBuffer != null) {
        cout << "token is: " << tokBuffer << "\n";
        tokBuffer = strtok(null, "'- "); //I don't need to pass in the buffer again because it remembers the first time I called it
    }
}