stl - Reading formatted data with C++'s stream operator >> when data has spaces

Question

I have data in the following format:

4:How do you do?
10:Happy birthday
1:Purple monkey dishwasher
200:The Ancestral Territorial Imperatives of the Trumpeter Swan

The number can be anywhere from 1 to 999, and the string is at most 255 characters long. I'm new to C++ and it seems a few sources recommend extracting formatted data with a stream's >> operator, but when I want to extract a string it stops at the first whitespace character. Is there a way to configure a stream to stop parsing a string only at a newline or end-of-file? I saw that there was a getline method to extract an entire line, but then I still have to split it up manually [with find_first_of], don't I?

Is there an easy way to parse data in this format using only STL?

Answer 1

The C++ String Toolkit Library (StrTk) has the following solution to your problem:

#include <string>
#include <deque>
#include "strtk.hpp"

int main()
{
   struct line_type
   {
      unsigned int id;
      std::string str;
   };

   std::deque<line_type> line_list;

   const std::string file_name = "data.txt";

   strtk::for_each_line(file_name,
                        [&line_list](const std::string& line)
                        {
                           line_type temp_line;
                           const bool result = strtk::parse(line,
                                                            ":",
                                                            temp_line.id,
                                                            temp_line.str);
                           if (!result) return;
                           line_list.push_back(temp_line);
                        });

   return 0;
}

More examples can be found Here