How to Use stringstream for Input With Spaces in C++?

Last Updated : 23 Jul, 2025

In C++, the std::stringstream class is a stream class to operate on strings and is very useful when we want to operate on a string as if it were a stream (like cin or cout). In this article, we will learn how to use string streams for input with spaces in C++.

Example:

Input:
string = “Hello, World!”

Output:
Hello, World! //Read the string into a string stream and output each word

Taking Input with Spaces Using stringstream in C++

In C++, the stringstream is used to create a stream to a string. This stream can be used to read the data from the string using >> (extraction operator) but it will read the input till the whitespace. The rest of the input would require more use of the>> operator making it not suitable for working with input strings with spaces.

To use stringstream for strings with spaces, we can use the std::getline() function that can read from the stream till the given delimiter.

Syntax of std::getline() in C++

getline(stream, dest, delim)

Here,

stream: stream to read data from
dest: string variable that will hold the read data.
delim: delimiter that specifies where to stop reading.

C++ Program to Use String Streams for Input with Spaces

The below example demonstrates how to use string streams for input with spaces in C++.

C++

// C++ Program to illustrate how to use stringstream for input with spaces
#include <iostream>
#include <sstream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
 // Initialize a string
 string myString = "Hello, World!";

 // Use stringstream for input with spaces
 stringstream ss(myString);
 string word;
 while (getline(ss, word, '\0')) {
 cout << word << endl;
 }

 return 0;
}