Subj : Re: Fixed-width data reading from FILE/streams
To   : borland.public.cpp.borlandcpp
From : Bob Gonder <notbg@notmindspring.invalid>
Date : Sun Feb 08 2004 12:00 pm

José Mauro T. Marinho wrote:

>Can somebody tell me in a nutshell what is the best way to read fixed-width
>(column delimited) data from a text file. Incredibly, Fortran is very best
>C/C++ in this tedious task...

First, open the text file in binary mode, not text.
Define a structure that matches your data.

typedef struct rec{
char	FirstPart[10];
char	SecondPart[27];
char	crlf[2];
}MYRECORD;

MYRECORD	record;

Use your choice of file functions to open the file in binary mode.
Then use the matching read function to
read( file, &record, sizeof(MYRECORD) )

If your file has cr/lf delimiting the records, don't forget to include
room in your structure for it.

.