Thread: string manipulation

Regular expressions are great but you can also use string functions.

1) You can use:

string str;
getline(yourInputFile, str, ',') ;

to read each chunk of data between the commas. That will read data up to the next comma and discard the comma, leaving you with only the data.

2) You can access the characters in a string like an array, so you can read one character at a time in a loop using:

str[i]

3) You can assign the char str[i] to an int variable, which will convert it to its ascii code. If the ascii code is between 48 and 57, then you have a digit. That should enable you to pick out all the digits in a chunk of data. First declare a string variable:

string input = "(";

Then, if the first character in your chunk of data is a digit, add it to your string, else continue the loop and get the next character in the string. When, a found digit counter reaches 3, add ")-" to the string and continue.

4) Create a master string and add each individually formatted string to it. When you've read the whole file in, close the file, open the file for writing--which will erase everything in there--and write the master string to the file.

You should be able to write the whole thing using 20-30 lines of code.