How do I read a text file from the second line using fstream?

Question

How can I make my std::fstream object start reading a text file from the second line?

Answer 1

Call getline() once to throw away the first line

There are other methods, but the problem is this, you don't know how long the first line will be do you? So you can't skip it till you know where that first '\n' is. If however you did know how long the first line was going to be, you could simply seek past it, then begin reading, this would be faster.

So to do it the first way would look something like:

#include 
#include 
using namespace std;

int main () 
{
    // Open your file
    ifstream someStream( "textFile.txt" );

    // Set up a place to store our data read from the file
    string line;

    // Read and throw away the first line simply by doing
    // nothing with it and reading again
    getline( someStream, line );

    // Now begin your useful code
    while( !someStream.eof() ) {
        // This will just over write the first line read
        getline( someStream, line );
        cout << line << endl;
    }

    return 0;
}