C++: Determining whether a variable contains no data
<p>I've been messing around in C++ a little bit but I'm still pretty new. I searched around a little bit and even using the keywords of exactly the problem I am trying to tackle yields no results. Basically I am just trying to figure out how to tell if a variable has no data. I have a file that my program reads and it searches for a specific character within that file and basically uses delimiters to determine where to store the actual data in a variable. Now I added some comments in the file saying that it should not be edited which has caused me some problems. So I pretty much want to count the number of comments, but I'm not sure how to do it because the way I had it set up was resulting in huge numbers being returned. So I figured I would attempt to fix it with a simple if statement to see if there was any data in the array while it was running the loop, and if there was then simply add +1 to my variable. Needless to say it did not work. Here's the code. And if you know a better way of doing this, by all means please do share.</p>

<pre><code>size_t arySearchData[20];
size_t commentLines[20];
size_t foundDelimiter;
size_t foundComment;
int commentsNum;

foundDelimiter = lineText.find("]");
foundComment = lineText.find("#");

if (foundComment != std::string::npos) {
    commentLines[20] = int(foundComment);

    if (foundComment = &lt;PROBLEM&gt;){
        commentsNum++;
    }
}
</code></pre>

<p>So it successfully gets the two comments in my file and recognizes that they are located at the first index(0) in each line but when I tried to have it just do commentsNum++ in my first if statement it just comes up with tons of random numbers, and I am not sure why. So as I said my problem is within the second if statement, I need a void or just a better way to solve this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.</p>

<p>And yes I do realize I could just determine if there 'was' data in the there rather than being void or null but then it would have to be specific and if the comment (#) had a space before it, then it would render my method of reading the file useless as the index will have changed.</p>
