Reading matrices from text file

[ntran]

Hi everyone,
I would like to program a simple finite element solver in c++ (I'm a relatively new programmer by the way). This is the issue, I have a text file with all the information of the model arranged in matrices; an input file would look something like this:

------------------------------------------
*nodes
1 0 0 0
2 10 15 0
3 17 2 0
4 -4 -1 0

*elements
1 1 2
2 2 3
3 3 4

*material
1 2.0e5 0.30 7.85e-9
2 7.0e4 0.21 2.11e-9

*loads
1 0 0 0
4 0 0 0
------------------------------------------

So, i want to read this text file and get each of the "*" matrices in its own array. The size of the matrices is not know. Could you suggest an efficient way to achieve this?

Thanks.

[toum]

You could use vectors of vectors.