Row, Row, Row Your Boat

The past few days have been fun whit C++ streams and dealing with file I/O. Way back when, I remember dealing with char arrays and char pointers to handle text information. But most of what I recall was writing my own tools to crudely manipulate strings to at least do some basic tasks.

In my first career related job, I was introduced to the world of Perl. And lo did string manipulation just work as it should. Not only basic string manipulation but regular expressions so that you can define patterns that can be found and modified. Quite a bit of systems administration in those days was parsing large amounts of text/log type data and making sense of it all. Doing any of that in plain old C would have been not fun.

When C++ first came out, many of my programming colleagues mentioned that the first thing they each did was to create a string class. As such strings are now "Standard" in C++. (That depends on if you consider the STL truly a part of the C++ standard or it is a standard unto itself)

From the file side, there are now streams. Now, I did not have as much of a problem with file handles and reading and writing, but now there is a means of consistent manipulation between files and strings for I/O.

With that all said, now it is time to create a DataFile parser. For now I am creating a simple INI style parser. But with a few extra features such as multi-line values and dealing with multiple values per key.