Forcing the extraction operator to ignore certain input

[alw0015]

I'm working on a piece of code that reads in a time from the user.

This time value consists of 3 separate inputs:

1 integer representing hours
1 char representing the ":"
1 integer representing minutes

for example:

cout << "Time: " <<;
cin >> x1 >> ch1 >> y1;

"the user would input 8:35 for example and it would be stored as
x1 = 8
ch1 = :
y1 = 35

Now, my problem is that I need to account for the fact that the user may input a bunch of junk AFTER I've got all the data I need.

For example, they might input:

"8:35 this is the time"

And I need it to ignore anything past 8:35, so essentially, anything past the y1 variable must be ignored.

I've been messing around with cin.ignore but haven't found a way to get it to ignore things after a certain series of inputs. Is it even possible to use cin.ignore in this situation?

I'm new to the C++ scene and need a simple, understandable solution.

[Banfa]

use getline to read the entire line of input into a string. Then from that string create a stringstream to read the bits you are interested in. You can just discard the rest, the input will be cleared because you have read it all.