a few years ago, I did some profiling of the various methods to tokenize a string, and found that strtok was generally about 5-10% faster than the method that laserlight and I are suggesting, but at the expense of not being thread safe, and just generally being less safe overall. in short, if you're going to learn C++, learn the C++ way of doing things. you'll find that the result is much more readable than a mix of C and C++.