Reading data from a file and storing it into a vector

Question

I\'m trying to read a list of items from from a file and then store them into a vector. The issue is my code is adding the last item to the vector twice and I\'m not sure why th

Answer 1

This is a typical symptom of the while (!infile.fail()) anti-pattern.

I'd define a struct and overload operator>> for that type:

struct item { 
    std::string name;
    std::string unit;
    int amount;
    int price;
};

std::istream &std::operator>>(std::istream &is, item &i) { 
    getline(is, i.name, '-');
    getline(is, i.unit, '-');
    is >> i.amount;
    return is >> i.price;
}

With those defined, reading the data borders on trivial:

std::ifstream inputFile("fileNameHere");

std::vector items { std::istream_iterator(inputFile),
                              std::istream_iterator() };

[I changed it from list to vector, because, well, you really don't want list. You can change it back, but probably shouldn't.]