Thread: file i/o help

For starters, why don't you consider writing an overload for operator>>. I suspect that the stream is invalid after you check it but before you have read in a whole object. The half filled element would then be the 11th entry. Maybe your file has a blank line at the end...

Code:

// helper function
void get(istream& s, std::string& str)
{
    s>>str;

    // check for a failed stream in the middle of reading a
    // record: Maybe you can throw an exception or something
    // here that you can catch in some outer while loop
    if ( s.fail() ) // throw Some_Exception();
}

istream& operator>>(istream& s, DATA& d)
{
     get(s,d.idNumber); 
     
     get(s,d.LastName);

     get(s, d.FirstName); 

     get(s, d.Major); 

     get(s, d.Class);

     return s;
}

int main()
{
    // much code excluded...
    DATA* data = new DATA();
    try {
        while(sin) {
             sin>> *data;
             InsertTail(data);
             count++;
        }
    }
    catch(...) {
          // catch your exception here
     }
    return 0;
}