loading from a file (easy, noobie question)

hello all,

I'm trying to write a program that loads numbers / strings from a file. It's for loading a 3D model, so contains a lot of numbers (for points) and tags (strings) saying what the numbers mean.

What sorts of methods / libraries can I use to do this? My main problem is getting good enough string handling to read the file and work out what the tags mean, ignoring white space etc. It sounds very simple and simultaneously very difficult to me :S

There are freely available 3D engines like Irrlicht 3D and Ogre 3D that support mesh loading. I've played around with Irrlicht and thought it was fairly straightforward to use, but I had some OpenGL experience prior so I wasn't completely new to 3D.