getline

Yeah I'm goingn to use the getline function as getline(istream, variable) --not using the delimiter -- The thing is I'm reading from a file that has certain things at varying length (like 10, 8, 6, etc) but the same amount of rows (basically big block letters using different characters). I'm going to use strings to read them all in and I was wondering, is there a way to take in the number above them and set that as the length of the strings for just that section? If that's not clear enough lemme know.