reading the nth item from a txt file

[Opel_Corsa]

if the items in the txt file are separated by space, or tab, how is it possible to read the nth item?

lets say the txt is as follows:

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
1 2 11 4
55 6 1 9 0 35 4
2 2 1

and i want to only read the 3rd item on each row.

the other questions is, how would you only count the number of items on the first row of the txt file? in the above case, it should be 9 since the 1st line has 9 items.

thanks.

[Daved]

Read in a line into a string, then parse the line. Since those are integers, the easiest way to parse a line would probably be to create a stringstream with the string and then use a loop to read each integer from the stringstream. Use a counter to find the third one and to identify the total number.