How to use wstringstream and getline with wchar_t?

Question

I have a pipe-delimited string that I want to put into the vector named result. However, it won't compile on getline. If I remove the pipe-delimiter character in getline, then it compiles:

#include <sstream>
using namespace std;
wstringstream ss(L"1,2,3|4,5,6|7,8,9|");
vector<wstring> result;
wstring substr;

while (ss.good())
    {
    getline(ss, substr, '|');  // <- this does not compile with wchar_t
    result.push_back(substr);
    }

How do I use getline with an incoming wchar_t string? I could do WideCharToMultiByte but that's a lot of processing if I can use getline with a wchar_t.

Answer 1

Your code does not compile because getline requires that the delimiter and the stream use the same character type. Your string stream ss uses wchar_t, but '|' is evaluated by the compiler as a char.

The solution is to use the appropriate character literal, like this:

#include <sstream>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() 
{
    wstringstream ss(L"1,2,3|4,5,6|7,8,9|");
    wstring substr;
    while (ss.good())
    {
        getline(ss, substr, L'|'); 
        std::wcout << substr << std::endl;
    }
}