need help...c++ using strings...difficult for me

can someone help me out here. I have 2 documents named Emma and Letter. The file contained Emma has a lot of introductory material which I need to skip. Easiest way is to hunt for the string "Chapter I". Then start with file position marker on the first line. The way this works is with groups of 3 words from letter.txt. The first word says how many lines you need to move down in the text by the number of letters in the words. Second word tells you the word on that line by the number of letters in the word. Third word, use the length of the word to find the particular letter. Repeat thus until the letter or character found is a period(.). The output should be "timeisimportant"

Example, the letter.txt document starts like this:

Hi cousin,

I might be at school with you soon............

So you would use Hi, cousin and I as first, second, and third word. And use the directions in Emma to find each letter. And keep repeating.
Here is my code so far: (which is not much)

Code:

---

int main()
{
ifstream inputFile;
ifstream input;

string a, w, x, z;
a = "CHAPTER I";


inputFile.open("Emma.txt"); // opens the txt file
input.open("Letter.txt");

while (w != a)
getline(inputFile, a);

while (!input.eof())
getline(input, z);

input >> ;




return 0;

---

if you are to offer help please keep it simple as I prob. am not as advanced as most of you. Thanks

Well first of all, you should learn to indent the code properly, otherwise it gets hard to read.

Next, I'm not sure what a, w, x, & z stand for and a few months from now after you've moved on to something else, you probably won't remember what they meant either, so you should always give variables & functions meaningful names.

It looks like a good start, but unless emma.txt has a line with exactly "CHAPTER I" on a line by itself, it won't find it. So you should verify that the file has a line with just that string, same case & everything, otherwise you'd need to do a case-insensitive string comparison (convert both strings to upper-case before comparing, for example).

while (w != a) - w is not initialized here


while (!input.eof()) - don't do this, read FAQ

Code:

---

while (getline(input, z))
{
  //do something with z
}

---

It's an interesting homework problem, but don't get overwhelmed by it. Break it into small chunks - divide and conquer. First, code the part that reads through a file a line at a time. Print out each line to stdout. That's one accomplishment.

Then learn how to find substrings in a string so you can find the keywords (like CHAPTER). Then learn how to a break a line into separate words. Once you have the first three words of a line, you learn how to count the characters in that word.

Find a reference on std::string (Google should be able to help) and marvel at the wealth of member functions it has to assist you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by vart

while (w != a) - w is not initialized here


while (!input.eof()) - don't do this, read FAQ

Code:

---

while (getline(input, z))
{
  //do something with z
}

---

---

Actually, since it's a string, it's initialized to "".