Reading from file without using string

Question

I am doing a school project where we must not use std::string. How can I do this? In the txt file the data are separated with a ";", and we do not know the length of the words.

Example:

apple1;apple2;apple3
mango1;mango2;mango3

I tried a lot of things, but nothing worked, always got errors.

I tried using getline, but since it is for string it did not work. I also tried to reload the operator<< but it did not help.

Answer 1

There are two entirely separate getline()'s. One is std::getline(), which takes a std::string as a parameter.

But there's also a member function in std::istream, which works with an array of chars instead of a std::string, eg:

#include <sstream>
#include <iostream>

int main() {
    std::istringstream infile{"apple1;apple2;apple3"};

    char buffer[256];

    while (infile.getline(buffer, sizeof(buffer), ';'))
        std::cout << buffer << "\n";
}

Result:

apple1
apple2
apple3

Note: while this fits the school prohibition against using std::string, there's almost no other situation where it makes sense.