[c++] taking input of a string word by word

I just started learning C++. I was just playing around with it and came across a problem which involved taking input of a string word by word, each word separated by a whitespace. What I mean is, suppose I have

   name  place animal 

as the input. I want to read the first word, do some operations on it. Then read the second word, do some operations on that, and then read the next word, so on.

I tried storing the entire string at first with getline like this

    #include<iostream>
    using namespace std;
    int main()
    {
     string t;
     getline(cin,t);
     cout << t; //just to confirm the input is read correctly
    }

But then how do I perform operation on each word and move on to the next word?

Also, while googling around about C++ I saw at many places, instead of using "using namespace std" people prefer to write "std::" with everything. Why's that? I think they do the same thing. Then why take the trouble of writing it again and again?

This question is related to c++

The answer is


Put the line in a stringstream and extract word by word back:

#include <iostream>
#include <sstream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    string t;
    getline(cin,t);

    istringstream iss(t);
    string word;
    while(iss >> word) {
        /* do stuff with word */
    }
}

Of course, you can just skip the getline part and read word by word from cin directly.

And here you can read why is using namespace std considered bad practice.


(This is for the benefit of others who may refer)

You can simply use cin and a char array. The cin input is delimited by the first whitespace it encounters.

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;

main()
{
    char word[50];
    cin>>word;
    while(word){
        //Do stuff with word[]
        cin>>word;
    }
}

getline is storing the entire line at once, which is not what you want. A simple fix is to have three variables and use cin to get them all. C++ will parse automatically at the spaces.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
    string a, b, c;
    cin >> a >> b >> c;
    //now you have your three words
    return 0;
}

I don't know what particular "operation" you're talking about, so I can't help you there, but if it's changing characters, read up on string and indices. The C++ documentation is great. As for using namespace std; versus std:: and other libraries, there's already been a lot said. Try these questions on StackOverflow to start.