input spacing

[shakethatmoney]

I'm writing a program that organizes music. My problem is skipping white space with the input.

For example;

Artist Song
Johnny Cash Big River
The Temptations Get Ready
System Of A Down Toxicity


Currently, my program has
Artist = Johnny
Song = Cash

when I really want
Artist = Johnny Cash
Song = Big River

I want one variable to contain the entire artist name and one for the song name. How do I go about doing this when there is so much white space to be skipped? How do I make the program know when the artist ends and where the song begins?

Sorry if this is unclear but any help is appreciated.
Thanks.

[kempofighter]

That is going to be tough since some artist names contain two words, some 3, some 5, and so forth. Do you see the problem with that?

Try adding a delimiter to the text file such as a ':' between fields. If you are going to work with text files you must define a file format where the program can recognize where one field ends and another begins.

Johnny Cash: Big River, Ring of Fire
System of a Down: Toxicity

You see where I am going with that? If you read each line into a std::string using getline, then the program can parse each string by searching for the known delimiter that signifies where the artist name ends. In my example, I also showed how you can setup multiple songs per artist using commas.

[shakethatmoney]

That's a great idea! Thanks.

[PanGalactic]

Common delimited file types in the industry are CSV (comma separated values, where strings are quoted but numbers are not), pipe-delimited, and tab-delimited. Tabs are nice for this sort of thing because it is unlikely that a song or band name will have a tab in it.