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C++, getline, searching through file issue

Hello World!!!

ok I am taking a my first C++ class and we are suppose to write a very simple program. I have worked my way up to writing to a file, listing the contents of the file, and now i am on to the fun part of searching through the file for a particular word/string.

the program i have made compiles nicely, however, the search function does not provide me with the information i want it to.
I am going to give the portion of code that is giving me the problem. Any help would be appreciated.

Code:

void Book::search()

{

        ofstream inBookFile("book.txt",ios::in);

        string titlesearch;

        string author;

        string date;

        string desc;

        string title;



        if (inBookFile.is_open())

        {

          cout << "enter the title of a book you wish to search for: \n";

          cin >> titlesearch;

          while (! inBookFile.eof())

            {

                stringstream stream(title);

                getline(stream,title,',');

                getline(stream,author,',');

                getline(stream,date,',');

                getline(stream,desc,'.');

                if (titlesearch == title)

                {                

                        cout << "Title :\t\t" << title << endl;

                        cout << "Author :\t\t" << author << endl;

                        cout << "Publish Date :\t" << date << endl;

                        cout << "Description :\t" << desc << endl;

                }

          }

        }

        else cout << "Unable to open file";

}

BTW. this is a book keeping program. the file it is looking at follows, ordered as title, author, date, description (ignore the garbled nonsense as i was testing the program out)

Code:

red,        john,        a,        a.

red,        chris,        a,        a.

red,        turn,        a,        a.

red,        clown,        s,        s.

blue,        john,        3,        3.

df,        d,        d,        d.

john,        red,        blue,        green.

P.S. i dont know if i was correct using the stringstream stream() function. but it worked previously for listing all of the books in the file. as shown below

Code:

void Book::display()

{

        ifstream inBookFile("book.txt",ios::in);

        string title;

        string author;

        string date;

        string desc;



        while (getline(inBookFile,title))

        {

                stringstream stream(title);

                getline(stream,title,',');

                getline(stream,author,',');

                getline(stream,date,',');

                getline(stream,desc,'.');

                cout <<setw(20)<< title << setw(23) << author << setw(20)<< left << date << "\n";

        

        }        

}

There's a couple of problems with the code you posted concerning Book::search().

First, the following line:

Code:

ofstream inBookFile("book.txt",ios::in);

should be:

Code:

ifstream inBookFile("book.txt",ios::in);

Note the 'i'. If you want to avoid this mistake in the future, just declare an fstream (don't specify 'o' or 'i').

The next problem is quite simple; you are not reading from the file! I personally do not like checking for eof() because the eof-flag is not set until a read fails. Thus I recommend that you consider setting up your while loop as follows:

Code:

...



string data;



while (getline(inBookFile, data))

{

  stringstream stream(data);

  ...

}