using (importing and saving) csv files

Hey all, for my next (and last, about time) assignment, my professor is asking us to try and use/manipulate csv files (specifically to import, manipulate, and finally save). This is the first time in the semester that we're playing around with them, and I'm not a bit clueless as to where to begin. Would it be similar to opening and closing regular files? If I already wrote something like this:

Code:

---

if (argc != 3) //if there are an incorrect number of arguments
        {
                cerr        << "\n\tIncorrect usage.\n"
                << "\tCorrect syntax: " << argv[0] << " inputFile outPutFile\n\n";
                exit(1);
        }
       
        ifstream fin;
        ofstream fout;
       
        fin.open (argv[1]); //opens input file from command line
       
        if (fin.fail()) //if file cannot open
        {
                cerr << "Could not open " <<argv[1] << endl;
                exit(1);
        }
       
        fout.open (argv[2]);
       
        if (fout.fail()) //if file cannot open
        {
                cerr << "Could not open " <<argv[2] << endl;
                exit(1);
        }
//main program, using fin and fout

        fin.close();
        fout.close();

---

Would this be able to provide a template for using csv files? Or do I need to learn new syntax? Thanks in advance for your troubles!

Are you referring to comma-separated values (CSV)? If so that should be fairly straightforward.

I would attack this with find() and substr(), but there is probably a C++ replacement for strtok that I don't know about.

Sorry. Yea, Comma Separate Values. I'm a bit new, so do you mean that whenever I need to read in data, I would use find(), and then whenever I need to modify, I would use substr()? And finally, how would I save the data into a new file (create a new entry/whatever)? Thanks again for any and all help

I would wait for one of the gurus to speak up on this, but as its simply a text file with a distinct token I would think its gonna be fairly easy. STRTOK was really made for this, but it will not accept C++ strings far as I can tell.

EDIT: Looked this up and found a code segment that may help you. This is not mine, but it will provide an alternative to strtok for working with strings.

Code:

---

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <sstream>

std::string myText("some-text-to-tokenize");
std::istringstream iss(myText);
std::string token;
while(getline(iss, token, '-'))
{
      std::cout << token << std::endl;
}

---

O_o

Within C++, using `std::string', the `strtok' or `strpbrk' functions don't directly exist, but `strcspn' is basically spelled `std::string::find_first_of'.

Parsing a regular old "CSV" file is, largely, is easy as using `std::getline', `std::string::find_first_of', and `std::string::substr' in a nice little dance.

See what you can figure out with those functions.

Parsing the variation that uses escape characters and allows quoted strings with the nested non-consecutive separators is a little more difficult, but you don't have to go there unless you need to.

Soma

There is no split in the standard library (aka strtok), but Boost has some nice string algorithms, filling out the missing parts of the standard library. Among them, a split function.
Basically something like

Code:

---

std::vector<std::string> vector;
boost::algo::split(vector, input_string, boost::any_of("-"));

---

Probably some wrong here and there, but that's the basics of it.

An easy way of extracting variables from a CSV file is to use getline(stream, std::string, delimiter) in a loop. Then convert the extracted string to the proper type of variable with the stringstream class.

Jim