I'm trying to make a relatively simple program but I can't remember what to do to get it to work. What I basically want it to do is read in information from an external file that contains characters and numbers, like (44, 12)\n , of course there's a bunch of them in a row so that's why I put that \n there. I don't care for those characters, I just want to put the first number in a variable and the second number in another. Now, I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I've been trying to start off by doing: ifstream infile; infile.open("file.txt"); while( infile ) { infile >> x; if ( x == '(' ) infile >> x; ... } Am I using the wrong method? I'm obviously no expert at this yet, I've read many tutorials on file reading but none showed how to exclude non-integers. I want the reader to skip the characters and just continue reading in and store that number in a variable for later calculations. I don't want to use getchar() that would overly complicate things. I've thought about getline() but I don't know how that thing works, does it skip spaces or characters? I don't know. I'm not totally sure what I'm doing wrong, I thought originally what I was doing was right but my program just hangs and does nothing.

Am I using the wrong method? Probably; it depends on the type of x. my program just hangs and does nothing. I'm kinda surprised it hangs; the loop should break after the first pass. If x is an int, as I assume it is, then the next bit of text you read better be convertible into an int. Obviously, ( cannot. What to do about this? Personally, I'd make a function, like this: int readVal(istream &in) { int x = 0; //We move forward, looking for digits... while (in && (unsigned)(in.peek() - '0') > 9) in.ignore(); //If in.eof(), this will fail, and we'll return 0; in >> x; return x; } Then I'd modify your given bit of code to read like this: ifstream infile("file.txt"); //If we got a non-zero value into x, !infile.eof() //Or, if x = 0, continue to loop if infile.good(). while (x = readVal(infile) || infile) { . . . . }