[Qt-interest] Text file manipulation

[Phil]

Thank you for reading this.

The following is a simplified version of what I'm trying to achieve.

I have a text file that looks something like this:

fruit, apple, orange, grape
fruit, lemon, quince, pear
vegetable, turnip, pea, onion

The first thing I have done is to read the text file into a QStringList 
which gives me one long comma separated string.

Then, say I'm looking for fruit.

I search though the QStringList and place each occurrence of fruit 
into a table like this which I display:

apple   orange    grape
lemon  quince     pear

So far so good.

Now say I want to change quince to cherry and then save the 
original text file with the changed text. This where things get 
messy.

I've had to keep a counter of where quince occurred in the 
QStringList and replace it with cherry at that index point. It sounds 
simple enough but the code has turned out to be quite complicated 
and I think there must be a far simpler alternative.

I was thinking along the lines of a two-dimensional QStringList or 
QByteArray  but achieving either is not obvious to me at the 
moment either.

I've spent most of the day on this, can anyone offer any 
suggestions?

-- 
Regards,
Phil