Need help about monitoring txt file and reading new(last) entry(word) from that txt file

This is my first contact with C++.I have to make program that will mon开发者_运维知识库itor one .txt or .doc file and read every new(last) entry(word) from it.Only thing that I was able to do by now is to completely read txt file, but that is not the point, I can't even get only last word from txt file so I would really appreciate your help with this.

Thank you all in advance!!!

Not sure if this is homework, and just in case it is I'm trying to avoid spoiling it by "telling to much", and instead point you to the key ideas you could use.

To avoid reading the whole file, you could use first use the seekg method to position the file a certain number of bytes from the end, then perform the "read to the last word" from there.

To perform the "read to the last word" task proper (net of the optimization of not reading the whole file one word at a time, for which see first paragraph) use the >> operator with the std::ifstream as the left operand and a std::string as the right operand: just put this in a while(!thestream.eof()) { ... } so it will keep reading until it has the last word.

BTW, note that reading the text from a .doc file will be orders of magnitude harder than reading it from a text file, unless you can use a suitable ".doc-reading library" (the standard C++ library has no such functionality, per se).

Reading from MS Word from C++ is a tedious task; you'll need to get through the jumble of COM interfaces. Since you are saying it's your first contact with C++, my advice is to concentrate on plain text instead, namely on getting the last line of a plain text file.

I would do something like this. Provide your implementations of ReadFromEnd and FindRightmostLineSeparator, they should be trivial, and initialize the fileSize variable.

int const INITIAL_BUFFER_SIZE = 64;
int bufferSize = INITIAL_BUFFER_SIZE;
char* lastLine = NULL;
std::auto_ptr<char> buffer (new char[buffer_size]);
while(true) {
    ReadFromEnd(buffer, buffer_size);
    lastLine = FindRightmostLineSeparator(buffer);
    if (lastLine == NULL && bufferSize == fileSize)
        lastLine = buffer;
    if (lastLine)
        break;
    buffer_size *= 2;
    if (buffer_size > fileSize)
        bufferSize = fileSize;
    buffer.reset(new char[buffer_size]);
}
// lastLine contains the pointer to your last line