Read Numeric Data from a Text File in C++

It can depend, especially on whether your file will have the same number of items on each row or not. If it will, then you probably want a 2D matrix class of some sort, usually something like this:

class array2D { 
    std::vector<double> data;
    size_t columns;
public:
    array2D(size_t x, size_t y) : columns(x), data(x*y) {}

    double &operator(size_t x, size_t y) {
       return data[y*columns+x];
    }
};

Note that as it's written, this assumes you know the size you'll need up-front. That can be avoided, but the code gets a little larger and more complex.

In any case, to read the numbers and maintain the original structure, you'd typically read a line at a time into a string, then use a stringstream to read numbers from the line. This lets you store the data from each line into a separate row in your array.

If you don't know the size ahead of time or (especially) if different rows might not all contain the same number of numbers:

11 12 13
23 34 56 78

You might want to use a std::vector<std::vector<double> > instead. This does impose some overhead, but if different rows may have different sizes, it's an easy way to do the job.

std::vector<std::vector<double> > numbers;

std::string temp;

while (std::getline(infile, temp)) {
    std::istringstream buffer(temp);
    std::vector<double> line((std::istream_iterator<double>(buffer)),
                             std::istream_iterator<double>());

    numbers.push_back(line);
}

...or, with a modern (C++11) compiler, you can use brackets for line's initialization:

    std::vector<double> line{std::istream_iterator<double>(buffer),
                             std::istream_iterator<double>()};

The input operator for number skips leading whitespace, so you can just read the number in a loop:

while (myfile >> a)
{
    // ...
}

you could read and write to a seperately like others. But if you want to write into the same one, you could try with this:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main() {

    double data[size of your data];

    std::ifstream input("file.txt");

    for (int i = 0; i < size of your data; i++) {
        input >> data[i];
        std::cout<< data[i]<<std::endl;
        }

}

You can use a 2D vector for storing the numbers that you read from the text file as shown below:

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <string>
#include <sstream>
#include<fstream>
int main() {
    std::string line;
    double word;

    
    std::ifstream inFile("data.txt");
    
    //create/use a std::vector
    std::vector<std::vector<double>> vec;
    
    if(inFile)
    {
        while(getline(inFile, line, '\n'))        
        {
            //create a temporary vector that will contain all the columns
            std::vector<double> tempVec;
            
            
            std::istringstream ss(line);
            
            //read word by word(or double by double) 
            while(ss >> word)
            {
                //std::cout<<"word:"<<word<<std::endl;
                //add the word to the temporary vector 
                tempVec.push_back(word);
            
            }      
            
            //now all the words from the current line has been added to the temporary vector 
            vec.emplace_back(tempVec);
        }    
    }
    
    else 
    {
        std::cout<<"file cannot be opened"<<std::endl;
    }
    
    inFile.close();
    
    //lets check out the elements of the 2D vector so the we can confirm if it contains all the right elements(rows and columns)
    for(std::vector<double> &newvec: vec)
    {
        for(const double &elem: newvec)
        {
            std::cout<<elem<<" ";
        }
        std::cout<<std::endl;
    }
    
    
    
    return 0;
}

The output of the above program can be seen here.