Reading all but the last few lines of a data file

[pbhuter]

I can easily skip the header of a data file using getline, but then when I parse through the data file and get to the footer of the file, I end up stuck in a loop because the program is trying to parse columns of data that no longer exist. Is there an easy way to stop reading when there is no longer data in the line? It looks like there is a blank line followed by some footer information, but I cannot guarantee that all of my data files will look like that (i.e. I need something pretty generic).

[Texan40]

If the file format is well defined then you should look at the specification to figure this sort of thing out. It's most likely not something that is implicit to input in C++.