c++ how to build a 2D matrix of strings from a .dat file? 5 columns x rows

Question

I need to read a .dat file which looks like this:

Atask1 Atask2 Atask3 Atask4 Atask5
Btask1 Btask2 Btask3 Btask4 Btask5
Ctask1 Ctask2 Ctask3 Ctask4 Ctask5
Dt         


        

Answer 1

Your problem addresses a number of issues, all of which I will attempt to answer in one go. So, forgive the length of this post.

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

int main(int argc, char argv[]){
  std::vector  v;//just a temporary string vector to store each line

  std::ifstream ifile;
  ifile.open("C://sample.txt");//this is the location of your text file (windows)

  //check to see that the file was opened correctly
  if(ifile.is_open()) { 
    //while the end of file character has not been read, do the following:
    while(!ifile.eof()) {
      std::string temp;//just a temporary string
      getline(ifile, temp);//this gets all the text up to the newline character
      v.push_back(temp);//add the line to the temporary string vector
    }
    ifile.close();//close the file
  }

  //this is the vector that will contain all the tokens that
  //can be accessed via tokens[line-number][[position-number]
  std::vector < std::vector > tokens(v.size());//initialize it to be the size of the temporary string vector

  //iterate over the tokens vector and fill it with data
  for (int i=0; i

Note, I did not use iterators, which would have been beneficial here. But, that's something I think you can attempt for yourself.