File I/O

[guidance51x]

Hello Everyone

I've been struggling to figure out what I'm sure is a simple problem. Say for example I'm creating a file that lists a description of a person, i.e. age, gender, weight.
int age = 40;
char gender = male;
int weight = 175;

and if i were to put that into a file called Barney.txt, the file would display this:

40
male
175

now i understand the basics of reading a file, but say i open the file and only want to read the gender (in this case 'male'). How do i go through reading a file only selecting certain chunks? All of the tutorials I have read only tend to confuse me more. Any help would be appreciated thanks.

[kbw]

You have to read (or explicity skip) everthing. A flat file has sequential access.

[guidance51x]

so there is no way to read the gender variable without first reading the age variable (In my example)?

[Bazzy]

You can ignore all the data before the newline character
eg:

yourfile.ignore(numeric_limits<streamsize>::max(),'\n');//Ignore everything before the 1st '\n'
yourfile >> gender;