Obtaining a certain section from a line in a file (C++)

Question

I've spent a lot of time looking online to find a answer for this, but nothing was helping, so I figured I'd post my specific scenario. I have a .txt file (see below), and I am trying to write a routine that just finds a certain chunk of a certain line (e.g. I want to get the 5 digit number from the second column of the first line). The file opens fine and I'm able to read in the entire thing, but I just don't know how to get certain chunks from a line specifically. Any suggestions? (NOTE: These names and numbers are fictional...)

//main cpp file
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    ifstream fin;
    fin.open("customers.txt");



    return 0;
}

//customers.txt
100007     13153     09067.50     George F. Thompson
579489     21895     00565.48     Keith Y. Graham
711366     93468     04602.64     Isabel F. Anderson

Answer 1

Some simple hints in your code to help you, you will need to complete the code. But the missing pieces are easy to find at stackoverflow.

//main cpp file
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
#include <vector>

using namespace std;

splitLine(const char* str, vector<string> results){
    // splits str and stores each value in results vector
}

int main()
{
    ifstream fin;
    fin.open("customers.txt");
    char buffer[128];
    if(fin.good()){
        while(!fin.eof()){
            fin.getline(buffer, 256);
            cout << buffer << endl;

            vector<string> results;         
            splitLine(buffer, results);
            // now results MUST contain 4 strings, for each 
            // column in a line
        }

    }
    return 0;
}