Thread: Newline character not being picked up in a conditional statement

I have the following code:

Code:

            while (lineread != "\n")
            {
                getline(ifs,lineread);
            }

In essence, it reads an input file, line by line until it hits a line only containing a newline character. So if the input text file is:

2 7
GC 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
1 0 290 590 880 1170 - -
2 0 340 680 1020 1360
3 0 390 770 1160 1400
4 0 430 860 1290 1400
5 0 470 940 1400
6 0 510 1010 1400

7 12.5
GC 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
1 0 340 690 1030 1380 - -
2 0 410 820 1230 1630
3 0 470 940 1410 1880
4 0 530 1060 1590 2120
5 0 590 1180 1770 2360
6 0 650 1290 1940 2500

It should exit the while loop after hitting line 6. What happens however is that it goes into a perpetual loop and doesnt exit the while loop upon reading line 6.

What I did was changed the code to:

Code:

            while (lineread != "*")
            {
                getline(ifs,lineread);
            }

and the input file to:

2 7
GC 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
1 0 290 590 880 1170 - -
2 0 340 680 1020 1360
3 0 390 770 1160 1400
4 0 430 860 1290 1400
5 0 470 940 1400
6 0 510 1010 1400
*
7 12.5
GC 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
1 0 340 690 1030 1380 - -
2 0 410 820 1230 1630
3 0 470 940 1410 1880
4 0 530 1060 1590 2120
5 0 590 1180 1770 2360
6 0 650 1290 1940 2500

and finally it stops after line 6. In this case, merely changing the "\n" conditional character to a simple asterisk character "*" fixes the problem.

However I wish to keep the input text file as is with the newlines, so how do I make it exit the while loop when detecting a \n as a line?

I think getline discards the delimiter (by default '\n') so you should be testing for "" instead of "\n".

Originally Posted by laserlight

The newline character is not stored, so your loop should be more like:

Code:

while (getline(ifs, lineread) && !lineread.empty())
{
    // ...
}

Originally Posted by dandrestor

I think getline discards the delimiter (by default '\n') so you should be testing for "" instead of "\n".

Both solutions work. Thanks.