Remove extra whitespace using fstream

[Grux]

Hi, I am trying to create a program that will remove all of the extra whitespace in one file, and output the result to another file. My code thus far prints only the first letter of the original file. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <cctype>
#include <cstdlib>

using namespace std;

void filter_blank_spaces(ifstream& in_stream, ofstream& out_stream);

int main()
{
	ifstream fin;
	ofstream fout;

	fin.open("proj-8.dat");

	if (fin.fail())
	{
		cout << "Input file could not be opened.\n";
		exit(1);
	}

	fout.open("proj-8_2.dat");

	if (fout.fail())
	{
		cout << "Output file could not be opened.\n";
		exit(1);
	}

	filter_blank_spaces(fin, fout);
	fin.close( );
	fout.close( );
	cout << "Done.\n";

	return 0;
}

void filter_blank_spaces(ifstream& in_stream, ofstream& out_stream)
{
	char next;
	in_stream.get(next);

	do
	{
		if (isspace(next))
			out_stream << ' ';
		else
			out_stream << next;
		in_stream.get(next);
	}
	while (! in_stream.get(next));
}

[moorecm]

Here's one way to strip all whitespace using streams:

fstream fin( "in.txt" );
fstream fout( "out.txt" );
string s;
while( fin >> s ) {
    fout << s;
}

[kbw]

Just read strings, the delimiters are ignored. You can then write the strings out with your delimiter choice.

[Grux]

Thanks for the help. I modified moorecm's suggestion to add one space between each word. My only question is how would I include a "\n" or "endl" to start the second sentence in the file on a new line?

[moorecm]

Do you just want to insert newlines or do you want to preserve the newlines as they were?

For the latter, you can try something like this:

while( getline( fin, s ) ) { // read a line at a time
    stringstream line( s );
    while( line >> s ) { // read the words, ignoring whitespace
        fout << s;
    }
    fout << endl; // put the newline back
}