Separate a line to columns using several spaces (>1) as a delimiter using C++ or linux

Question

I have several lines looking like this:

4539(random number of spaces)07235001(random number of spaces)Aach(random number of spaces)Trier Saarburg

I want to separate it to 4 columns using C++ or linux. The output I want will look like this:

4539|07235001|Aach|Trier Saasburg

So I want to treat several spaces as the delimiter but not the single one.

(random number of spaces thankfully is always > 1)

Lines do not always consist of 4 columns and the space problem is not always at the last column.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can use awk with regular expressions for this:

echo "4539     07235001      Aach    Trier Saarburg" | awk 'BEGIN { FS = "[ ]{2,}"  } { OFS = "|" };  {$1=$1; print $0 }' 

FS variable is used to set the field separator for each record and may contain any regular expression. OFS is the output equivalent of the FS variable.

Answer 2

You should read each field individually. The last field can be read until a newline

character is received:  
std::string column1;
std::string column2;
std::string column3;
std::string column4;
while (input_file >> column1)
{
  input_file >> column2;
  input_file >> column3;
  getline(input_file, column4);
}

Another method is to read the entire line using getline and then fetch out the substring fields using std::string::find and std::string::substr.