title: Reading/parsing text file input c++
body: <p>A little background: I am working on a sliding block puzzle for a school project and this is our first using C++ instead of Java. This is the first time I have had to implement something that reads data from a file.</p>
  
  <p>I have a simple question regarding reading input from a text file.
  I understand how to read the file line by line and hold each line in a string, I want to know if I can parse the string into different data types as the file is read.</p>
  
  <p>Currently I am reading each line and storing them as strings in a vector for parsing later, and I know there must be a much simpler way to implement this</p>
  
  <p>The first line holds 2 integers which will indicate the length and width of the grid, the following lines will have 4 integers and a char for use as arguments when creating the blocks.</p>
  
  <p>My question is this, if I read the file character by character instead, is there a function I can use that will detect if the character is an integer or a char (and ignore the spaces) so I can store them immediately and create the block objects as the file is read? How would i deal with integers >10 in this case?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: Just noting I am using fstream to read the files, I am unfamiliar with other input methods</p>
  
  <p>A sample input:</p>
  
  <pre><code>4  4
  3  1  2  1  b
  1  1  1  1  a 
  </code></pre>