Loading a Linux formatted text file using a C++ windows application

Question

My problem is I am trying to load a Linux formatted text file and read it regularly as is one was opening up a windows formatted text file in a C++ application. I have gotten it to work perfectly when the file is formatted exactly how I want it to be in windows and have the data form the file loaded into a list of lists.

To try to describe my problem a little better what I am currently able to do right now is if I have a file which is tab delimited I am able to store all of the contents from each row into a list of strings where each string is whatever each tab is separating. I then have a list of all of the rows.

For example my text file I'm reading my look something like this:

156   Hit   83.2   23:34
23    Miss  21.4   23:38

and so on....

This code spinet below is what I have been using, which I had found help elsewhere and altered it to work how I needed it to. It will create a list with two items in the list where each of the items contains a list of 4 strings each string representing the contents in each of "columns" for the current row. Hope this is explained thorough enough.

    ifstream infile(file);
list <list <string> > data;
while (infile){
    string s;
    if (!getline( infile, s )) break;

        std::istringstream ss ( s );
        list <string> record;

    while (ss){
        string s;
        if (!getline( ss, s, '\t' )) break;
            record.push_back( s );
    }
    data.push_back( record );
}

That is exactly what I would like to do however instead of the text file I would be reading from being formatted as a Windows text file it will be a Linux text file and will not have a tab in-between each "item" in each row; but instead will contain a random number of spaces. My thought was I could open the file up in binary mode and read it that way and instead of having a tab be my delimiter I could choose any amount of white space. However I am not exactly sure how to do that as I am still relatively new to C++ and have not specifically worked with reading Linux formatted text files from a Windows C++ application. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

This has nothing to do with Linux versus Windows. You can use >> to perform formatted input of whitespace-separated fields:

string s;
while (ss >> s)
    record.push_back(s);

To skip whitespace explicitly, use std::ws ; to disable whitespace skipping, use std::noskipws .