C++ string and char manipulation

[liquid_cool]

if i have a char[ ] which and the string it represents has 3 integers followed by an unknown number of words, the third integer being the number of characters in the remaining unknown words. is there a simple way to get a char* with the words?

for example
char buffer[500];
where the buffer = "0 1 14 a test string"

is there an easy way to get a char* with "a test string" if the number of digits in the third integer is unknown and the third integer represents the number of characters in the string following it?

I was trying to do it with sscanf, but couldn't figure out how to scan in a string containing whitespace.