How can I ignore the "end of line" or "new line" character when reading text files word by word?

Question

Objective:

I am reading a text file word by word, and am saving each word as an element in an array. I am then printing out this array, word by word. I know this could be done more efficiently, but this is for an assignment and I have to use an array.

I'm doing more with the array, such as counting repeated elements, removing certain elements, etc. I also have successfully converted the files to be entirely lowercase and without punctuation.

Current Situation:

I have a text file that looks like this:

beginning of file




more lines with some bizzare     spacing
some lines next to each other
while

others are farther apart
eof

---

Here is some of my code with itemsInArray initialized at 0 and an array of words refered to as wordArray[ (approriate length for my file ) ]:

---

ifstream infile;
infile.open(fileExample);

while (!infile.eof()) {

    string temp;
    getline(infile,temp,' ');  // Successfully reads words seperated by a single space
    
    
    if ((temp != "") && (temp != '\n') && (temp != " ") && (temp != "\n") && (temp != "\0") {
            wordArray[itemsInArray] = temp;
            itemsInArray++;
    }

---

The Problem:

My code is saving the end of line character as an item in my array. In my if statement, I've listed all of the ways I have tried to disclude the end of line character, but I've had no luck.

How can I prevent the end of line character from saving as an item in my array?

I've tried a few other methods I have found on threads similar to this, including something with a *const char that I couldn't make work, as well as iterating through and deleting the new line characters. I've been working on this for hours, I don't want to repost the same issue, and have tried many many methods.

Answer 1

The standard >> operator overloaded for std::string already uses white-space as word boundary so your program can be simplified a lot.

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <vector>

int
main()
{
  std::vector<std::string> words {};
  {
    std::string tmp {};
    while (std::cin >> tmp)
      words.push_back(tmp);
  }
  for (const auto& word : words)
    std::cout << "'" << word << "'" << std::endl;
}

For the input you are showing, this will output:

'beginning'
'of'
'file'
'more'
'lines'
'with'
'some'
'bizzare'
'spacing'
'some'
'lines'
'next'
'to'
'each'
'other'
'while'
'others'
'are'
'farther'
'apart'
'eof'

Isn't this what you want?