While you've already gotten some answers to the question you asked, perhaps it's worth answering some you should have about the code that you didn't ask:
void loadInstructions(char* fileName)
Since the function isn't going to modify the file name, you almost certainly want to change this to:
void loadInstructions(char const *fileName)
or
void loadInstructions(std::string const &fileName)
ifstream input;
input.open(fileName);
It's much cleaner to combine these:
ifstream input(fileName);
or (if you passed a string instead):
ifstream input(fileName.c_str());
while(!input.eof());
This has already been covered.
string line;
getline (input,line);
char * lineChar = &line[0];
//instruction cmd; //This will be used later to store instructions from the parse
char * token;
token = strtok (lineChar," ");
// just trying to get the line number for now
int lineNumber = atoi(token);
Most of this is just extraneous. You can just let atoi
convert directly from the original input:
string line;
getline(input, line);
int lineNumber = atoi(line);
If you're going to tokenize more later, you can use strtol
instead:
char *end_ptr;
int lineNumber = strtol(line, &end_ptr, 10);
This will set end_ptr
to point just past the end of the part that strtol
converted.
I'd also consider an alternative though: moving your code for reading and parsing a line into a class, and define operator>>
to read those:
struct line {
int number;
operator int() { return number; }
};
std::istream &operator>>(std::istream &is, line &l) {
// Just for fun, we'll read the data in an alternative fashion.
// Instead of read a line into a buffer, then parse out the first number,
// we'll read a number from the stream, then ignore the rest of the line.
// I usually prefer the other way, but this is worth knowing as well.
is >> l.number;
// When you're ready to parse more, add the extra parsing code here.
is.ignore(std::numeric_limits<std::istream::pos_type>::max, '\n');
return is;
}
With this in place, we can print out the line numbers pretty easily:
std::copy(std::istream_iterator<line>(input),
std::istream_iterator<line>(),
std::ostream_iterator<int>(std::cout, "\n"));
input.close();
I'd usually just let the stream close automatically when it goes out of scope.