I am working on this project where I need to read in a lot of data from .dat files and use the data to perform simulations. The data in my .dat file looks as follows:

DeviceID  InteractingDeviceID InteractionStartTime InteractionEndTime
  1            2                  1101                1105

1,2 1101 and 1105 are tab delimited and it means Device 1 interacted with Device 2 at 1101 ms and ended the interaction at 1105ms.

I have a trace data sets that compile thousands of such interactions and my job is to analyze these interactions.

The first step is to parse the file. The language of choice is C++. The approach I was thinking of taking was to read the file, for every line that's read create a Device Object. This Device object will contain the property DeviceId and an array/vector of structs, that will contain a list of all the devices the given DeviceId interacted with over the course of the simulation.The struct will contain the Interacting Device Id, Interaction Start Time and Interaction End Time.

I have a two fold question here:

1. Is my approach correct?

2. If I am on the right track, how do I rapidly parse these tab delimited data files and create Device objects without excessive memory overhead using C++?

A push in the right direction will be much appreciated.

Thanks