Re: ifstream question

From:
"John Brawley" <jgbrawley@charter.net>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:32:37 -0600
Message-ID:
<jEooj.47$di3.24@newsfe06.lga>
(Top-posting hated,
bottom-posting proper;
where fits "middle-posting" ? (*grin*)
See below)
"Jerry Coffin" <jcoffin@taeus.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.220afb53b9b50afc989b95@news.sunsite.dk...

In article <3t6oj.21$az7.5@newsfe07.lga>, jgbrawley@charter.net says...

[ ... ]

BUT: O, beautiful synergy: as it happens, the first file line's three
numbers (the rest have five) are not intended to go into my x,y,z,r,c
database, so all I had to do was read these three and their two char > >

commas (but _not_ read the newline) _outside_ of the loop, which then > >
the loop exactly what it expected (a char first --the \n-- in the loop-
[...]

here (you included) didn't see what sheer idiocy I had perpetrated
upon myself. (*grin*)


I wouldn't be quite so hard on yourself -- things like this really can
be a pain for almost anybody to get right.

There are other ways that can be a bit easier though. For one example,
when you read numbers from a stream, the stream uses a locale to
actually read the numbers, as well as to classify the other characters
that get read from the stream. When you read numbers, it treats white-
space as delimiters between the numbers -- e.g. if you started with a
file like:


Apart from the excellence of your info useful to many others no doubt, I
didn't know it'd be a 'standard' phenomenon that whitespaces would be
ignored in a program process with streams in C++. I know C++ ignores them
in a .cpp file to be compiled but it would not have occured to me that this
could be the case also within how a compiled .exe treats the stream.

That gives me a major reason to perhaps alter my file _writers_ to record
data in space-dlimited format instead of comma-delimited, which I'd been
resisting since the preceding Python version of this uses the
comma-delimited form.

As to your code (left in below), that's where others will benefit. It's
flat-out beyond my understanding. I haven't even figured out how to write a
class, just barely managed recently to get a few functions to work.
(Compiler laughs at me, says mine are an outmoded form --they look like
Python functions--but grudgingly compiles the program anyway...)

I appreciate the effort and idea, but that's a lot more code (even if I
understood it) than I want to have to do, just to deal with the commas (and
the newlines), when the "wrong" way (fooling the typed infile>> function
into doing what I want it to, without writing a purposeful fooler like this)
works perfectly with a tenth of the code.

I've said in another thread that I'm not a programmer. I'm _not_ a
programmer. I'm just a man who has no choice but to do one thing one time
in code so it will run on a computer (a model of something), and who has no
choice but to now use C++ to gain the sheer speed advantage over Python.
(The program is 95% continuous pure number-crunching; hopes for very large
data sets.)

Thanks for the info and sentiments. I do appreciate them.

1 2 3 4 5

instead of:

1,2,3,4,5

it would have skipped the white-space automatically, and just read
numbers.

That leads to a fairly simple (if somewhat oddball) solution: create a
locale that says ',' is a whitespace character, and then tell the stream
to use that locale:

class my_ctype : public std::ctype<char> {
    mask my_table[UCHAR_MAX];
public:
    my_ctype(size_t refs = 0)
        : std::ctype<char>(my_table, false, refs)
    {
// copy the normal character class table, so ' ', tab, etc., are still
// white space
        std::copy(classic_table(),
            classic_table() + table_size,
            my_table);

// for our purposes, comma is also white space.
        my_table[','] = (mask)space;
    }
};

int add(int a, int b) { return a+b; }

int main() {
    // create a locale that includes our ctype:
    std::locale x(std::locale::classic(), new my_ctype);

    // and tell cin to use the new locale:
    std::cin.imbue(x);

    // now we'll read numbers from standard input into a vector
    std::vector<int> numbers;

    std::copy(std::istream_iterator<int>(std::cin),
        std::istream_iterator<int>(),
        std::back_inserter(numbers));

    // print out the numbers:
    std::copy(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(),
        std::ostream_iterator<int>(std::cout, "\n"));
    std::cout << "\n";

    // add numbers to show they really are numbers:
    std::cout << std::accumulate(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(),
        0, add);

    return 0;
}

input:
1,2,3,4,5

output:
1
2
3
4
5

15

--
    Later,
    Jerry.


Thank you very much.

--
Peace
JB
jb@tetrahedraverse.com
Web: http://tetrahedraverse.com

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