# 7.3.3 Application: Connecting Cities

## 7.5.3 Application: Connecting Cities

In this example, you are going to take a look at a real-life graph example. This graph represents a hypothetical airline route map any you want to figure out how to get from one city to another with the least amount of connections.

Did we mention this was real-life 80 years ago? This route map doesn’t use a traditional hub network that airlines often use today, but it does do a good job illustrating how a graph can be used.

As mentioned before, graphs often contain a lot of data. Even this relatively simple route map has dozens of connections, so the graph will be loaded using a function, but this time the function is reading from a file.

You will notice that there are several helper functions. While these may be a little different than the last example, you should notice that the `city` struct and the `shortestPath` function are essentially the same as the previous example.

Take time to explore this example. Try changing the connections to different cities to see the path.

### [Try This Example](https://replit.com/@Poston/733-Connecting-Cities#main.cpp)