How do you read a word in from a file in C++?

So I was feeling bored and decided I wanted to make a hangman game. I did an assignment like this back in high school when I first took C++. But this was before I even too geometry, so unfortunately I didn't do well in any way shape or form in it, and after the semester I trashed everything in a fit of rage.

I'm looking to make a txt document and just throw in a whole bunch of words (ie: test love hungery flummuxed discombobulated pie awkward you get the idea )

So here's my question: How do I get C++ to read a random word from the document?

I have a feeling #include<ctime> will be needed, as well as srand(time(0)); to get some kind of pseudorandom choice...but I haven't the foggiest on how to have a random word taken from a file...any suggestions?

Thanks ahead of time!

From stackoverflow

• I would recommend creating a plain text file (.txt) in Notepad and using the standard C file APIs (fopen(), and fread()) to read from it. You can use fgets() to read each line one at a time.

  Once you have your plain text file, just read each line into an array and then randomly choose an entry in the array using the method you've suggested above.

  Jeff : didn't mean it to seem like I wanted to use word, .txt was the intent. I tried to place a new line between each of those examples but it seemed to not work. Could you please explain what you mean? I looked at those two links but I didn't quite understand them.

  jeffamaphone : You may find the iostream example posted by TrayMan easier to use than the C APIs. I don't think I can explain it in this little box.

  Jeff : fair enough, thank you for the idea though!

  Arafangion : Beware that Notepad does not neccessarily save in ASCII format.

• Here's a rough sketch, assuming that the words are separated by whitespaces (space, tab, newline, etc):

  vector<string> words;
  ifstream in("words.txt");
  while(in) {
    string word;
    in >> word;
    words.push_back(word);
  }
  
  string r=words[rand()%words.size()];
  

  jeffamaphone : Be sure to #include .

  Jeff : Understood...so 'in' does the same as 'infile'? Or are those two different things?

  Jeff : And simply out of curiosity and the fact I've not seen it before, what is the push_back() doing? Afraid I've not seen that command before

  TrayMan : It inserts the value to the end of the vector. There's also a push_front.

  dalle : The push_back member function of std::vector adds an element (in this case a string) to the end of the vector.

  jeffamaphone : See the following vector<> reference. This is the sugary C++ way of doing things. http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/stl/vector/

  Arafangion : "in" here is nothing more than a name for a variable that TrayMan decided to use. He could've used 'foo', 'bar', 'cheese', or even 'stackoverflow_input_argument'.

  Vadi : Unfortunetly, this code does not work in vc++ compiler.

• The operator >> used on a string will read 1 (white) space separated word from a stream.

  So the question is do you want to read the file each time you pick a word or do you want to load the file into memory and then pick up the word from a memory structure. Without more information I can only guess.

  Pick a Word from a file:

  // Note a an ifstream is also an istream. 
  std::string pickWordFromAStream(std::istream& s,std::size_t pos)
  {
      std::istream_iterator<std::string> iter(s);
      for(;pos;--pos)
      {    ++iter;
      }
  
      // This code assumes that pos is smaller or equal to
      // the number of words in the file
      return *iter;
  }
  

  Load a file into memory:

  void loadStreamIntoVector(std::istream& s,std::vector<std::string> words)
  {
      std::copy(std::istream_iterator<std::string>(s),
                std::istream_iterator<std::string>(),
                std::back_inserter(words)
               );
  }
  

  Generating a random number should be easy enough. Assuming you only want psudo-random.