File IO, .ini readable?

I wanna start off as simplistic and somewhat useful as possible. So i think imma try to make a Quiz program. But one thing i would like to do is hold the questions and whatnot in a ini file.

So can you point me in the right direction for ini reading? or would i have to create a function to do that for me? And also, Can someone point me in the right direction for something like "tokens"? In other words, if you have
string myString = "jake.lee.john.joe.phill"

How can you retrieve the 2nd token, and whatnot. In mIRC you can use lovely convienient things called token identifiers, such as $gettok which allows you to retrieve a "token" from within text and any seperating character. ie if i wanted to get lee from myString i would type $gettok(myString,2,46) where "2" is the 2nd token, and "46" is the 46th ASCII character. Commonly known as ".", so can anyone help me with these things? Im not asking anyone to write em for me, just if they exist let me know where, and ifnot can you possibly give me a link or something in the directed fields? Thanks!

For your second question, the function strtok() comes to mind, but having always made my own string functions (I don't know why, actually...), I wouldn't be able to tell you for sure. If you're feeling ambitious and are feeling very comfortable with C-Style strings, you can just set up a for loop, cycle through the elements in the string, and every time you encounter the ".", in your example, start reading to a different string. You'd end up with an array of string, and thus an array of tokens.

As for your first question. File formats are pretty much completely up to you. It sounds like you're fairly new to programming so I would go with a simple setup. Set up a file of questions (questions.dat or whatever) and just have one question per line, then have an answers file with all the answers on corresponding lines. You use strcmp() to check the answer the user inputs with that read from the answers file. If you google enough you could probably find code libraries to make this easier, but to be honest - you'll learn a lot more if you do it yourself. Probably easier in the long run for a project of this size, actually.

>>So can you point me in the right direction for ini reading?

Reading files using C++ syntax requires either an fstream in ios::in mode or an ifstream. You can use C file syntax, FILE *, in C++ as well.

ya i can read files simplisticly, but reading an ini formatted file is another story. Is their a pre programmed function for such a use? ie "ifstream.ini(File,Group,IniItem)" somethin like that.

this is a quick program that I threw together, i hope this helps in some way...

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;
char str[256];

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    
    cout << "Please enter a string (maximum of 256 chars):" << endl;
    cin.getline ( str,256, '\n' );
    ofstream a_file("test.ini");
    a_file << str;
    a_file.close();
    cout << "This is what is contained in the file test.ini:" << endl;
    cout << "" << endl;
    std::ifstream b_file("test.ini");
    std::cout << str;
    cout << "" << endl;
    b_file.close();
  
  system("PAUSE");	
  return 0;
}

There is no function specifically for reading ini formatted files. You can either look for an INI API online or just make your own file format and function, or just our own INI reading function. It sounds like you already know standard file I/O in C/C++. Correct?

I assume there is far more to it then i know of, i dont even fully understand b_file, a_file, ect., but the tutorials iv covered so far have lightly explained the usage of the most basic applications of fstream.

But if i have to make my own thats no problem at all, if thats going to happen i'll just need to learn a bit more and go a step further than standard INI, such as subitems and whatnot. Same thing i did for hash tables in mIRC.

Thanks all for your replies!

*edit*
And silly nub me, the application and usage would be a bit diff, but i didnt even think about using Arrays in place of my "tokens". So i could just go
[Jake][Lee][John] ect.. (the order is wrong im sure, cant remember and too lazy to load the page to check, but you get the idea hehe).

Thanks

The Windows function for reading .ini files is GetPrivateProfileString(). Search the board for samples.