Organizational problems.

For my work I''ve written a program that stores, manages and allows for manipulation of calibration data. It works on the principle that there is a unique id and history of calibration for each id. I''m using: map > Entry of course is a class I''ve defined to store a single entry of the history, and the string is the id. This is all fine, but two questions I''ve had are is it worth finding common interfaces between repetitious code and isolating it into a function? I''ve got repetitious code pasted multiple times in main simply because it was easier, but I''m sure there is a much easier way. Another thing I''ve wondered is if there is a simpler way to handle formatted data input from files. I''m tired of having to manage it by reading in X amount of characters, then the word for each of 10,000 odd lines. Any help is appreciated. Thank you.