How to use SDL_RWops and SDL_RWseek to read text files, line by line?

Question

I'm right now looking for alternative ways to read text files on a line-by-line basis, for cross-platform compatibility (Windows / Linux).

My current solution is to go look for (or seek out) the newline (line break) in a text file using SDL2.

To demonstrate, I have a simple text file, with just 2 lines of gibberish text:

Hello world,
This is a new line with a line break.

On some text editors, you are able to display newlines or line breaks, and the above text would look somewhat like this:

Hello world,↵
This is a new line with a line break.

I want to use SDL_RWops, and if possible, use SDL_RWseek, or (SDL_RWops*)->seek(SDL_RWops*), to find the newline (line break), denoted by ↵ in the above example. That way, I can write a shorthanded version of SDL_RWreadToLine or some method that allows me to fetch text, line by line.

I believed the current method is very inefficient to check to see if I reached a newline, using psuedo-code:

//File reading/writing (We're only going to read)
//edict2 is a gigantic UTF-8 Japanese <-> English dictionary text file. 
//That text file is useful for text operations (read/write) testing purposes.

SDL_RWops* edict2 = SDL_RWFromFile("edict2u", "r");         //The "u" stands for UTF-8 compatible.
if (edict2) {
    Sint64 currentBytePointer = 0;              //Holds the current pointer.
    Sint64 currentReadPointer = 0;              //Holds the current read pointer.
    Sint64 fileSize = edict2->size(edict2);     //Grabs the file size of the file.
    char* buffer = new char[256];               //Some buffer to capture the read text characters.
    while (currentBytePointer < fileSize && currentReadPointer != 0) {
        Sint64 length = edict2->seek(edict2, 1, RW_SEEK_CUR);       //Reads 1 byte from current read position.
        Sint64 temp = edict2->read(edict2, buffer, length, length); //Implicit C conversion from void* to char*.
        if (buffer[0] != '\0' && buffer[0] == '\n') {
            //Found, do something about it
        }
    }
    delete buffer;
}
else {
    //File doesn't exist, do nothing.
}

I'm sure there are bugs that I may have missed out on, considering that I'm reading from a text file that may contain multiple bytes.

And that's why I wanted to look for SDL2 alternatives.

Does anyone know of a better way to read text line by line using SDL2?

Answer 1

Instead of using SDL2's SDL_RWops, just use the C++ standard library.

A combination of std::ifstream and std::getline() should do the trick for reading strings from text files, line by line.

//File reading/writing (We're only going to read)
std::ifstream edict2("dict/edict2u");
if (edict2.is_open() && edict2.good()) {
    std::string buffer;
    while (std::getline(edict2, buffer)) {
        //Do something about the buffer.
        doAction(buffer);

        //Then clear the buffer once you're done with it.
        buffer.clear();
    };
}

Thanks to @Tyyppi_77 for pointing out the obvious.