Indexing .txt files in c++

[DavidKrutsko]

Hello,

although this question has probebly been answered a bunch of times i couldent find the answer im looking for.... anyways what im trying to do is....

Say i want to create a c++ program to read something from a file but i want the file to be in the following format...

File.txt
----------------------------
"Data"
{
"Data1" "546"
"Data2" "546"
"Data3" "446"
}

"Something else" "546" "43246"
"aslk" "asdh"

and so on...
----------------------------

how could i go about writing this c++ file in the simplest way possible.... yet still be efficient....

(im NOT looking for something .ini for example...
[something]
a = s;dkas
b = askjd
....)

/////////////////////////////////////////
here is an example of a program that may use this....

Calculate.exe

Numbers.txt
"First_Number" "5"
"Second_Number" "10"

OR

"add"
{
"First_Number" "5"
"Second_Number" "10"
}
/////////////////////////////////////////

thanks in advance....

[weaknessforcats]

If you want sonething like this:

"Something else" "546" "43246"

then write your string and be sure to write the null terminator. Then on the play back you can use getline to read into a buffer until you reach the \0 delimiter.

Method 2:

Something else

requires 14 characters.

You could write:

14Something else3546543246

Here you read first into an int (4 bytes) and that int is the string length. So you allocate 14+1 characters (that's one is for the null terminator) and read 14 bytes then tack on a \0 in the buffer and you have "Something else".

Then you read into an int (4 bytes) and allocate 3+1, etc for the "546" string.

Method 3:

Something else|546|43246|

Here the | symbol is used as a delimiter. The advantage here is you can see this character and with a text file you can create the file using an editor and read the file wioth your program.

It all boils down to the fact that you need to know the format of the file in oreder to read it.

[DavidKrutsko]

Well needing to know the format of the file kinda eliminates of what im really trying to do....

if you look at the Half life 2 gameinfo.txt and weapon scripts (well practically the whole game definition system) you would see that there is no format and everything is very random.....

here i found a wikipedia entry to help me but im still kinda unclear about this whole topic...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_array#C.2B.2B

[weaknessforcats]

Well needing to know the format of the file kinda eliminates of what im really trying to do....

Still, you can't read a character and say: Gee, I wonder what this is part of?

You need to know how to read the file. That implies you know how it was written.

You caninvent a script so you can read one record from the file and look at the first non-blank characters to determine how to parse the rest of the record:

FILENAME= logfile.txt
PATHNAME = c:\MyGames\Game141
MOVE= A7 G10
LASER= OFF

etc...