extracting word-per-word from strings

Hello,

I'm creating a sea battle game for a project and at a certain point the user has to enter a string of the following form: 'ship x-coordinate y-coordinate orientation' as many times in a row as he wishsh, e.g. "S5 1 1 v S4 5 4 h S2 1 8 h".
I create extra strings to save every item seperately for further use. But how can I extract them properly one by one? I've been trying for about 2 hours now and I'm starting to run out of ideas :).
Here's an example of what I tried. A bit silly code, but for illustration purposes of course.

Code:

---

std::string s("S5 1 1 v S4 5 4 h S2 1 8 h");

while(! s.empty()){
std::string example(s,0,2);
s.erase(0,2);
}

---

Obviously that's not really ideal, since the length of every word can vary.
I thought using getline would be much better, since you can give a parameter when you'd like it to stop (in my case " "). However, I don't know how to get that to work for strings.

Thanks a lot if you can help me out.
Ed.

Use a stringstream container to parse your string:

Code:

---

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

...

std::string s("S5 1 1 v S4 5 4 h S2 1 8 h");
std::string temp;
std::istringstream parser(s);
while( parser >> temp )
    std::cout << temp << std::endl;

---

Should output:

Code:

---

S5
1
1
v
S4
5
4
h
S2
1
8
h

---

If you want to create your own parser, loop through the string until you hit a space and then store the word up to that point. Something like this in pseudocode:

Code:

---

while string is not empty
  x=0
  while s[x] is not a space and x is less than or equal to s length
        x++
  store substring from s[0] to s[x-1]
  erase s[0] to s[x-1]

---

One nice benefit of using string streams is that the code is already there for you and accounts for any kind of white space. For something like this I'd keep it simple. Plus it seems to me you may have a user type something like:

Example:

Code:

---

S5  1 1 v S4 5 4 h S2    1 8        h

---

Note: some of the above has multiple spaces or tabs

Thanks a lot all of you. It works like a charm :).
And I think it's indeed more 'dummy-proof' to use stringstreams (they always pay attention to that in our projects), although creating my own parser was fun too.