Inline function

I have been trying to learn how to use functions to make my code a lot less repeatitive, but I seem to have something wrong. I tried rereading the guides on the site, as well as looking into my C++ book, and couldn't find why this doesn't work. This is not the complete code, because that is 200 lines or so, so I dropped it down to the first 3 runes I parse for.

If I leave the combo function in, I get nothing that comes after it in the program, I still get the "Reading from:" and the file path, but I don't get a count of how many of each I have. Any help is welcome .

RuneParser.cpp

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>

inline void combo(int first, int second)
{
    while (first>=3)
    {
    first-3;
    second++;
    }
}

int main ( int argc , char ** argv )
{
    std::string filename = "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Owner\\My Documents\\Parsing\\Runes.txt";
    if (argc >= 2) filename = argv[1];
    std::ifstream file( filename.c_str() , std::ios::in );
    if (!file.is_open())
        std::cout<<"Error opening file";
    else
        std::cout << "Reading from: " << filename << std::endl;
    std::string line;
    int el = 0;
    int eld = 0;
    int tir = 0;

    while (getline( file , line ))
	{

        if (line.empty() || (line == "\r")) continue;
        int colon_pos = line.find(':');
        std::string rune = line.substr(colon_pos+2,line.size()-colon_pos-7);
        if (rune == "El")
            el++;
        else if (rune == "Eld")
            eld++;
        else if (rune == "Tir")
            tir++;
	}
    combo(el,eld);
    combo(eld,tir);

    std::cout<< "El:" << el << endl;
    std::cout<< "Eld:" << eld << endl;
    std::cout<< "Tir:" << tir << endl;
    

	std::cin.get();
}

Runes.txt

Code:

Number of Items : 39
1: El Rune
3: El Rune
4: Tir Rune
6: Tir Rune
8: Eld Rune
12: Tir Rune
14: El Rune
18: Tir Rune
19: El Rune
21: El Rune
24: Tir Rune
27: Eld Rune
31: El Rune
33: El Rune
35: Eth Rune
36: Tir Rune
37: Tir Rune

Code:

inline void combo(int first, int second)
{
    while (first>=3)
    {
    first-3;
    second++;
    }
}

Did you perhaps mean -= ?
Also you are passing those parameters by value (aka copy) so they are not affecting the variables in your main. Which doesn't appear to be what you intended. Try passing them by reference

I did mean to do first= first-3; (is that what you meant with -=?)

Thanks for the point in the right direction, I will go look up how to pass them by reference.

Edit: Ahh, well that made a large difference, the first-3 was causing it to loop indefinately. Once I changed that and set the function to pass them as a reference it worked great, thank you. (int& first0) <~~ magic!

glad it worked.

yes first -= 3 is shorthand for first = first - 3