qfegd wrote: In those situation stringstream can be cool! and (IMHO) utterly superfluous... there is already and input stream open in the form of the input file stream why read a line convert it to another input stream and then use operator>> on that stream:confused: as the input text file is rigorously defined why not use >> directly on the input file stream? operator>> is overloaded for the inbuilt types & defaults to consuming white space and newlines (thanks Bjarne) thus... char n1[255]; char n2[255]; double total, mean, grade; int count = 10; //specified in the input file format ifstream in_file(IN_NAME); //checking omit'd for clarity while(!in_file.eof()) {   in_file >> n1 >> n2;   total = 0.0;   for(int i = 0, i < count, ++i) {     in_file >> grade;     total += grade;   }   mean = total / count; } i will leave writing to the output file for you (it can all be fitted into the above loop in 3 lines) if your input file might be dirty you could add in_file.ignore(255,'\n'); to ignore upto 255 characters at the end of the line and any new line. hope this helps? :)

You don't need to apoligize for correcting bad examples. Many times in this forum some people post bad examples that foster bad coding in other developers. Nothing leads to poor quality software than code written half-assed.