Below is a little program in C++ which is supposed to act as the cat linux binutil: it gets one or several inputs as detailed in the command line arguments (possibly specifying stdin via '-') and copy them onto the standard output. Unfortunately, it shows an unintended behaviour that I cannot understand the root causes of...
Upon the following command
./ccat - test.text
I hit CTRL-D directly without passing any character. I would expect the program to display anyway the content of test.txt, but instead, the program exits without passing any more characters onto the standard output stream.
Any idea on how I should correct my code below to have the correct behaviour in this situation? Should I handle multiple instances of the standard streams (cin, cout...)? If so, do you know how this can be achieved in C++?
Thank you in advance.
/**** ccat.cpp ****/
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
#include <vector>
using namespace std;
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
if (argc <= 1) {
cout << cin.rdbuf();
} else {
vector<string> inputs;
for (int i=1; i<argc; ++i) inputs.push_back(argv[i]);
for (auto &in: inputs) {
if (in == "-" || in == "--") {
cout << cin.rdbuf();
}
else {
ifstream *fd = new ifstream(in);
if (!fd->is_open()) cerr << "Cannot open file \'" << in << "\'\n";
else cout << fd->rdbuf();
delete fd;
}
}
}
return 0;
}
I tried the following commands in sequence:
$ ./ccat > test.txt
Let's try this text.
I would expect a correct behaviour.
$ ./ccat - test.txt # I hit CTRL-D directly without passing any character first
$ ./ccat - test.txt
But when I add some characters before hitting CTRL-D... This works fine.
But when I add some characters before hitting CTRL-D... This works fine.
Let's try this text.
I would expect a correct behaviour.
As the example shows, I would expect in any of the two cases (last two shell prompts) that test.txt gets displayed onto the standard output, but this occurs only if I inject characters through the standard input first. Hitting CTRL-D straight away makes the program exit prematurely.
That's overload 10 here;
basic_ostream& operator<<( std::basic_streambuf<CharT, Traits>* sb );
and it says
If no characters were inserted, executes setstate(failbit).
In other words, cout is now in an error state and will not output anything.
Doing
cout.clear();
first of all in the else branch, or last of all in the if branch, should do it.
Note that sending end-of-file to standard input is usually not something you can recover or "restart" from, so you might only be able to use one standard input "section".
Related
I began learning strings yesterday and wanted to manipulate it around by filling it with a text from a text file. However, upon filling it the cstring array only prints out the last word of the text file. I am a complete beginner, so I hope you can keep this beginner friendly. The lines I want to print from the file are:
"Hello World from UAE" - First line
"I like to program" - Second line
Now I did look around and eventually found a way and that is to use std::skipary or something like that but that did not print it the way I had envisioned, it prints letter by letter and skips each line in doing so.
here is my code:
#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
#include <cstring>
#include <cctype>
using namespace std;
int main() {
ifstream myfile;
myfile.open("output.txt");
int vowels = 0, spaces = 0, upper = 0, lower = 0;
//check for error
if (myfile.fail()) {
cout << "Error opening file: ";
exit(1);
}
char statement[100];
while (!myfile.eof()) {
myfile >> statement;
}
for (int i = 0; i < 30; ++i) {
cout << statement << " ";
}
I'm not exactly sure what you try to do with output.txt's contents, but a clean way to read through a file's contents using C++ Strings goes like this:
if (std::ifstream in("output.txt"); in.good()) {
for (std::string line; std::getline(in, line); ) {
// do something with line
std::cout << line << '\n';
}
}
You wouldn't want to use char[] for that, in fact raw char arrays are hardly ever useful in modern C++.
Also - As you can see, it's much more concise to check if the stream is good than checking for std::ifstream::fail() and std::ifstream::eof(). Be optimistic! :)
Whenever you encounter output issues - either wrong or no output, the best practise is to add print (cout) statements wherever data change is occurring.
So I first modified your code as follows:
while (!myfile.eof()) {
myfile >> statement;
std::cout<<statement;
}
This way, the output I got was - all lines are printed but the last line gets printed twice.
So,
We understood that data is being read correctly and stored in statement.
This raises 2 questions. One is your question, other is why last line is printed twice.
To answer your question exactly, in every loop iteration, you're reading the text completely into statement. You're overwriting existing value. So whatever value you read last is only stored.
Once you fix that, you might come across the second question. It's very common and I myself came across that issue long back. So I'm gonna answer that as well.
Let's say your file has 3 lines:
line1
line2
line3
Initially your file control (pointer) is at the beginning, exactly where line 1 starts. After iterations when it comes to line3, we know it's last line as we input the data. But the loop control doesn't know that. For all it knows, there could be a million more lines. Only after it enters the loop condition THE NEXT TIME will it come to know that the file has ended. So the final value will be printed twice.
The following code is intended to concatenate words entered by the user.
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
int main() {
// insert code here...
std::string s;
std::string concString;
while (std::cin >> s)
{
concString = concString + s;
}
std::cout << concString << std::endl;
return 0;
}
I am stuck in this while loop during execution because of which I am not able to print the concatenated string. How do I exit this loop? What is an invalid input for std::cin?
Typically, a loop like that is stopped by end of file, rather than invalid input.
In a *nix environment, you can usually send an end of file to the terminal with CTRL+d, and at a windows console, CTRL+z.
See https://stackoverflow.com/a/16136924/1084944
You could, however, implement your own additional way to signify end of input. For example, having your users enter a blank line when done, or the word quit or such. Once you've chosen one, you should communicate that to the user, and you will have to structure your loop to be able to detect these conditions and exit.
I have a bug with my code (the code at the end of the question). The purpose of my C++ executable is to read a file that contains numbers, copy it in a std::vector and
then just print the contents in the stdout? Where is the problem? (atoi?)
I have a simple text file that contains the following numbers (each line has one number)
mini01:algorithms ios$ cat numbers.txt
1
2
3
4
5
When I execute the program I receive one more line:
mini01:algorithms ios$ ./a.out
1
2
3
4
5
0
Why I get the 6th line in the stdout?
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <fstream>
#include <vector>
using namespace std;
void algorithm(std::vector<int>& v) {
for(int i=0; i < v.size(); i++) {
cout << v[i] << endl;
}
}
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
string line;
std::vector<int> vector1;
ifstream myfile("numbers.txt");
if ( myfile.is_open()) {
while( myfile.good() )
{
getline(myfile, line);
vector1.push_back(atoi(line.c_str()));
}
myfile.close();
}
else {
cout << "Unable to open file" << endl;
}
algorithm(vector1);
return 0;
}
You should not use while (myfile.good()), as it will loop once to many.
Instead use
while (getline(...))
The reason you can't use the flags to check for looping, is that they don't get set until after an input/output operation notices the problem (error or end-of-file).
Don't use good() as the condition of your extraction loop. It does not accurately indicate whether the next read will succeed or not. Move your call to getline into the condition:
while(getline(myfile, line))
{
vector1.push_back(atoi(line.c_str()));
}
The reason it is failing in this particular case is because text files typically have an \n at the end of the file (that is not shown by text editors). When the last line is read, this \n is extracted from the stream. Yes, that may be the very last character in the file, but getline doesn't care to look any further than the \n it has extracted. It's done. It does not set the EOF flag or do anything else to cause good() to return false.
So at the next iteration, good() is still true, the loop continues and getline attempts to extract from the file. However, now there's nothing left to extract and you just get line set to an empty string. This then gets converted to an int and pushed into the vector1, giving you the extra value.
In fact, the only robust way to check if there is a problem with extraction is to check the stream's status bits after extracting. The easiest way to do this is to make the extraction itself the condition.
You read one too many lines, since the condition while is false AFTER you had a "bad read".
Welcome to the wonderful world of C++. Before we go to the bug first, I would advise you to drop the std:: namespace resolution before defining or declaring a vector as you already have
using namespace::std;
A second advise would be to use the pre increment operator ++i instead of i++ wherever feasible. You can see more details on that here.
Coming to your problem in itself, the issue is an empty new line being read at the end of file. A simple way to avoid this would be to check the length of line before using it.
getline(myfile, line);
if (line.size()) {
vector1.push_back(atoi(line.c_str()));
}
This would enable your program now to read a file interspersed with empty lines. To be further foolproof you can check the line read for presence of any non numeric characters before using atoi on it. However the best solution as mentioned would be use to read the line read to the loop evaluation.
Okay Some may remember me from earlier, I am fairly new to programming so I may seem not up to par with many others. However at the moment, i am very much stuck.
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
string temp,input,output;//store input from file, and get which file//
ofstream out("output.txt");
if(argc == 3)
{
if(ifstream(argv[2]))
{
input = argv[2];
ifstream in(input);
while(in.good())
{
in >> temp;
ReverseWord(temp);
cout << temp << endl;
out << temp << endl;
}
out.close();
in.close();
}
}
}
This code right here is meant to reverse the letter order of words that it takes in from a file by typing "revstr < input.txt" with input.txt being the file name. however at the moment the program just opens and closes right away without anything happening and nothing being typed into the console. does anyone know how to fix this?
If you call your program as revstr < input.text your main() function will be called (on usual platforms) with:
argv = { "revstr", NULL }
argc = 1
In this case you get the contents of input.txt by reading from std::cin. That is what 'input readirection' means: your standard input stream is redirected to read from a file rather than the keyboard (aka terminal) device. No need to deal with the filename in that case.
To pass a filename as argument, use revstr input.txt. That should call main()with
argv = { "revstr", "input.txt", NULL }
argc = 2
so the filename will be available as argv[1].
The behavior in the former case is typically due to command shells, which treat '<' as a redirection directive (which ends the preceding command). You may have expected to get
argv = { "revstr", "<", "input.txt", NULL }
argc = 3
For that you would need to apply some form of quoting or escaping to disable the shell behavior, for example revstr "<" input.txtor revstr \< input.txt. But as far as I understand where you are coming from, you want the redirection. In that case forget about argc and argv and simply read your input from std::cin.
Here is my code:
#include <iostream>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <fstream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
string line;
ifstream inputFile;
inputFile.open("input.txt");
do {
getline(inputFile, line);
cout << line << endl;
} while (line != "0");
return 0;
}
input.txt content:
5 9 2 9 3
8 2 8 2 1
0
In Enclipse, it goes to infinite-loop. I'm using MinGW 5.1.6 + Eclipse CDT.
I tried many things but I couldn't find the problem.
Since you are on windows try:
} while (line != "0\r");
The last line is stored as "0\r\n". The \n is used as the line delimiter by getline so the actual line read will be "0\r"
or
you can convert the dos format file to UNIX format using command
dos2unix input.txt
Now your original program should work. The command will change the \r\n at the end of the line to \n
Also you should always do error checking after you try to open a file, something like:
inputFile.open("input.txt");
if(! inputFile.is_open()) {
cerr<< "Error opening file";
exit(1);
}
It will create an infinite loop if no line contains exactly 0. For example 0\n is not the same thing as 0. My guess is that that is your problem.
EDIT: To elaborate, getline should be discarding the newline. Perhaps the newline encoding of your file wrong (i.e. windows vs. unix).
Your main problem is working directory.
Because you are specifying a file using a relative path it searches for the file from the current working directory. The working directory can be specified by your dev environment. (Note: The working directory is not necessarily the same directory where the executable lives (this is a common assumption among beginners but only holds in very special circumstances)).
Though you have a special end of input marker "0" you should also check that the getline() is not failing (as it could error out for other reasons (including beady formatted input). As such it is usually best to check the condition of the file as you read it.
int main()
{
string line;
ifstream inputFile;
inputFile.open("input.txt");
while((getline(inputfile, line)) && (line != "0"))
{
// loop only entered if getline() worked and line !="0"
// In the original an infinite loop is entered when bad input results in EOF being hit.
cout << line << endl;
}
if (inputfile)
{
cout << line << endl; // If you really really really want to print the "0"
// Personally I think doing anything with the termination
// sequence is a mistake but added here to satisfy comments.
}
return 0;
}