Read a specific line in ifstream.

[bavman]

I've been looking around and I keep running into the getline() command. I basically have a txt file with several lines. I want to be able to tell it a line number, such as 5 and have it go to line 5 and save the entire line to a string for example that it can display.How can i do this? Thanks for help.

[kempofighter]

Perhaps you could try the ignore function? Use '\n' as the delimiter and ignore 4 times. then use getline to read the 5th line.

Invoke this on your file stream object 4 times. This should advance the stream position to the 5th line. Then use getline to read the 5th line. I think that might work but I have not tried it.
ignore(std::numeric_limits<std::streamsize>::max(), '\n');

[kempofighter]

i do not think that there is such a function that does exactly what you want. If my idea works you could write your own wrapper function such that it takes a line number advances the stream to that line, reads it, and returns a string. One way or another you have to advance the file stream position on your own in order to get to the line that you want to read.