introduction/Approach to parsing/Game development

Hey, Just joined the forum! hope to find much knowledge!

Anyway, Im writing a c++ game using the SDL graphics library.

Ive got gravity, a character, a map loaded (from a textfile), etc. But I need to animate the character and i think its inefficient to put all the info of the x's, y's, w's and h's of all the characters movements in the code itself. I decided to put it all in a text file and 'parse' it, and this is where im having trouble, just cant get it to read the characters properly.

Am i taking the right approach, and if i am, how would i 'parse' the text file, ive tried many times myself.

This is the file says that im trying to read from:

Code:

---


type:1
{
anim:1
{
subanim:1
{
x:63
y:8
w:30
h:40
}
subanim:2
{
x:95
y:11
w:33
h:37
}
delay:500
}
}

---

And this is the code (a function) to read the file

Code:

---


void animateEntity(int animation, int entityNum , vector<liveEntity> entityInfo)
{
    //Temp variable for storage

    int type = 0;

    //Different Stages

    int stage = 0;

    //used for EOF

    int c;

    //For loops and other things

    int i = 0;

    //load some vars

    entityInfo.at(entityNum).animState = animation;

    entityInfo.at(entityNum).subAnimState++;

    //load the file

    FILE *animFile;

    animFile = fopen("animations.txt", "r");

    while((c = fgetc(animFile)) != EOF)
    {
        i++;
    }

    fclose(animFile);

    //create string/char based on i

    char animString[i];
    i = 0; //Reset i for reuse

    //put the chars into the array

    animFile = fopen("animations.txt", "r");

    while((c = fgetc(animFile)) != EOF)
    {
        animString[i] = c;
    }

    fclose(animFile);

    for (i = 0; i < sizeof(animString); i++)
    {
        if (stage == 0)
        {
            if (animString[i] == 't' && animString[i + 1] == 'y' && animString[i + 2] == 'p' && animString[i + 3] == 'e' && animString[i + 4] == ':')
            {
                if (entityInfo.at(entityNum).type == animString[i + 5] - '0')
                {
                    type = entityInfo.at(entityNum).type;
                    stage = 1;
                }
            }
        }
        else if (stage == 1)
        {
            if (animString[i] == '{')
            {
                stage = 2;
            }
        }
        else if (stage == 2)
        {
            if (animString[i] == 'a' && animString[i + 1] == 'n' && animString[i + 2] == 'i' && animString[i + 3] == 'm' && animString[i + 4] == ':')
            {
                entityInfo.at(entityNum).subAnimState = animString[i + 5] - '0';
            }
        }
    }
}

---

many thanks, Super Stinger

> animString[i] = c;
Perhaps put all the chars in the same place?

Or perhaps spread through the array
animString[i++] = c;

Edit:

Rather than inventing your own format and parser, consider using something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

You don't have to spend so much effort inventing the file format, or getting all picky parsing individual characters. There are many libraries available to do the grunt work, and give you the semantic content of the file right away.

Thanks for that, ill look it up :)

I note that your current file format very loosely resembles JSON. You could very well just turn it into JSON then use a JSON library like JSON Spirit.