In a book named "Think Like a Programmer" by Anton Spraul, on chapter 2, exercise 1, page 53, this is what is written:
Using the same rule as the shapes programs from earlier in the chapter
(only two output statements — one that outputs the hash mark and one
that outputs an end-of-line), write a program that produces the
following shape:
########
######
####
##
So we can only use cout << "\n"; and cout << "#"; but not cout << " ";
Solving this problem by printing spaces is easy (see code below). But is it possible to print such shape without printing spaces in C++?
#include <iostream>
using std::cin;
using std::cout;
int main()
{
int shapeWidth = 8;
for (int row = 0; row < 4; row++) {
for(int spaceNum = 0; spaceNum < row; spaceNum++) {
cout << " ";
}
for(int hashNum = 0; hashNum < shapeWidth-2*row; hashNum++) {
cout << "#";
}
cout << "\n";
}
}
Solving this problem by printing spaces is easy (see code above). But is it possible to print such shape without printing spaces in C++?
In one of the answers I read one can remove the for (int spaceNum. . . loop and rather just put cout << setw(row+1); to achieve that.
Clarification: The author never used a shape as example where one had to print spaces or indentations like the above. Interpreting the exercise above literally, he expects us to write that shape by printing "#" and "\n" only. Printing spaces or indentations by only printing "#" and "\n" seems not possible to me, so I thought maybe he was not careful when he wrote exercises. Or there's a way to achieve that but it's just me who doesn't know. This is why I asked this.
Yes, this is possible.
Set the stream width to the length of the row.
Set the stream formatting to right-justified.
Look up stream manipulators in your book or another C++ references.
Possibly! But that is a question about the system you’re running on, not about C++. As far as the language is concerned, it’s just outputting characters. The fact that outputting a “space” character moves the cursor to the right on the screen — or even the existence of the screen — is a matter of how the operating system and the software running on it interpret the characters that have been output.
Most notably, you can use ANSI escape sequences to move the cursor around on most text consoles. There’s no particular reason to do this unless you’re writing a full-screen text mode UI.
Related
I've been using Vim a lot lately, and I was wondering how the program manages to change the characters at certain positions in the terminal. For example, when using :rc, it replaces the character under the cursor with c.
I have also seen similar things done with Homebrew, which prints a progress bar to the screen and updates it when necessary.
How is this done in C/C++?
There is no standard way of doing this in C++.
It is done with OS dependent lbiraries, such as curses and similar libraries (ncurses) in the Unix/Linux world. Some of these libraries have been ported on across platforms (example: PDCurses)
For very simple things such as a progress bar or a counter, and as long as you remain on a single line there is the trick of using "\r" (carriage return) in the output, to place the cursor back at the begin of the current line. Example:
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
cout << "\rProgress: " << setw(3) << i;
this_thread::sleep_for(chrono::milliseconds(100));
}
Certainly, using ncurses or similar library is a good answer. An alternative may be to use ANSI Escape Codes to control the cursor in some terminal emulators (but not Windows command shell). For example, this code prints a line in multiple colors and then moves the cursor to 2,2 (coordinates are 1-based with 1,1 being the upper left corner) and prints the word "red" in the color red.
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
const std::string CSI{"\x1b["};
const std::string BLUE{CSI + "34m"};
const std::string RED{CSI + "31m"};
const std::string RESET{CSI + "0m"};
std::ostream &curpos(int row, int col)
{
return std::cout << CSI << row << ';' << col << 'H';
}
int main()
{
std::cout << "This is " << BLUE << "blue" << RESET << " and white.\n";
curpos(2,2);
std::cout << RED << "red" << RESET << '\n';
}
As mentioned that's not a matter of any C/C++ standard operations provided with stdout or cout (besides writing the necessary control characters to the screen).
Controlling the screen cursor of an ASCII terminal totally depends on implementation of the particular terminal program used, and besides a very narrow set of control characters, there's no standard established.
There are libraries like ncurses for a broader variety of linux terminal implementations, or PDcurses for a windows CMD shell.
I'm not sure to understand you completely but with creating an array of 100 elements of type char you can modify any position of the array and loop it with a std:cout to mostrate it on the console.
Perhaps could be better define the array of 50 chars to resuce the size of the printed result.
For example, if you have to print a progessbar in the 1% process, you should print:
Char progressbar[100] = {'X','','','','','','','','',........}
So I'm trying to make a little text based game for my first real project in C++. When the game calls for a big block of text, several paragraphs worth, I'm having trouble getting it to look nice. I want to have uniform line lengths, and to do that I'm just having to manually enter line breaks in the appropraite places. Is there a command to do this for me? I have seen the setw() command, but that doesn't make the text wrap if it goes past the width. Any advice? Here is what I'm doing right now if that helps.
cout << " This is essentially what I do with large blocks of" << '\n';
cout << " descriptive text. It lets me see how long each of " << '\n';
cout << " the lines will be, but it's really a hassle, see? " << '\n';
Getting or writing a library function to automatically insert leading whitespace and newlines suitable for a particular width of output would be a good idea. This website considers library recommendations off topic, but I've included some code below - not particularly efficient but easy to understand. The basic logic should be to jump forwards in the string to the maximum width, then move backwards until you find whitespace (or perhaps a hyphen) at which you're prepared to break the line... then print the leading whitespace and the remaining part of the line. Continue until done.
#include <iostream>
std::string fmt(size_t margin, size_t width, std::string text)
{
std::string result;
while (!text.empty()) // while more text to move into result
{
result += std::string(margin, ' '); // add margin for this line
if (width >= text.size()) // rest of text can fit... nice and easy
return (result += text) += '\n';
size_t n = width - 1; // start by assuming we can fit n characters
while (n > width / 2 && isalnum(text[n]) && isalnum(text[n - 1]))
--n; // between characters; reduce n until word breaks or 1/2 width left
// move n characters from text to result...
(result += text.substr(0, n)) += '\n';
text.erase(0, n);
}
return result;
}
int main()
{
std::cout << fmt(5, 70,
"This is essentially what I do with large blocks of "
"descriptive text. It lets me see how long each of "
"the lines will be, but it's really a hassle, see?");
}
That hasn't been tested very thoroughly, but seems to work. See it run here. For some alternatives, see this SO question.
BTW, your original code can be simplified to...
cout << " This is essentially what I do with large blocks of\n"
" descriptive text. It lets me see how long each of\n"
" the lines will be, but it's really a hassle, see?\n";
...as C++ considers the statement unfinished until it hits the semicolon, and double-quoted string literals that appear next to each other in the code are concatenated automatically, as if the inner double quotes and whitespace were removed.
There are pretty library to handle text formatting, named cppformat/cppformat on github.
By using this, you can manipulate text formatting easily.
You can make a tierce simple function
void print(const std::string& brute, int sizeline)
{
for(int i = 0; i < brute.length(); i += sizeline)
std::cout << brute.substr(i, sizeline) << std::endl;
}
int main()
{
std::string mytext = "This is essentially what I do with large blocks of"
"descriptive text. It lets me see how long each of "
"1the lines will be, but it's really a hassle, see?";
print(mytext, 20);
return 0;
}
but words will be cut
output:
This is essentially
what I do with large
blocks ofdescriptiv
e text. It lets me s
ee how long each of
1the lines will be,
but it's really a ha
ssle, see?
As part of a bigger application I am working on a class for reading input from a text file for use in the initialization of the program. Now I am myself fairly new to programming, and I only started to learn C++ in December, so I would be very grateful for some hints and ideas on how to get started! I apologise in advance for a rather long wall of text.
The text file format is "keyword-driven" in the following way:
There are a rather small number of main/section keywords (currently 8) that need to be written in a given order. Some of them are optional, but if they are included they should adhere to the given ordering.
Example:
Suppose there are 3 potential keywords ordered like as follows:
"KEY1" (required)
"KEY2" (optional)
"KEY3" (required)
If the input file only includes the required ones, the ordering should be:
"KEY1"
"KEY3"
Otherwise it should be:
"KEY1"
"KEY2"
"KEY3"
If all the required keywords are present, and the total ordering is ok, the program should proceed by reading each section in the sequence given by the ordering.
Each section will include a (possibly large) amount of subkeywords, some of which are optional and some of which are not, but here the order does NOT matter.
Lines starting with characters '*' or '--' signify commented lines, and they should be ignored (as well as empty lines).
A line containing a keyword should (preferably) include nothing else than the keyword. At the very least, the keyword must be the first word appearing there.
I have already implemented parts of the framework, but I feel my approach so far has been rather ad-hoc. Currently I have manually created one method per section/main keyword , and the first task of the program is to scan the file for to locate these keywords and pass the necessary information on to the methods.
I first scan through the file using an std::ifstream object, removing empty and/or commented lines and storing the remaining lines in an object of type std::vector<std::string>.
Do you think this is an ok approach?
Moreover, I store the indices where each of the keywords start and stop (in two integer arrays) in this vector. This is the input to the above-mentioned methods, and it would look something like this:
bool readMAINKEY(int start, int stop);
Now I have already done this, and even though I do not find it very elegant, I guess I can keep it for the time being.
However, I feel that I need a better approach for handling the reading inside of each section, and my main issue is how should I store the keywords here? Should they be stored as arrays within a local namespace in the input class or maybe as static variables in the class? Or should they be defined locally inside relevant functions? Should I use enums? The questions are many!
Now I've started by defining the sub-keywords locally inside each readMAINKEY() method, but I found this to be less than optimal. Ideally I want to reuse as much code as possible inside each of these methods, calling upon a common readSECTION() method, and my current approach seems to lead to much code duplication and potential for error in programming. I guess the smartest thing to do would simply be to remove all the (currently 8) different readMAINKEY() methods, and use the same function for handling all kinds of keywords. There is also the possibility for having sub-sub-keywords etc. as well (i.e. a more general nested approach), so I think maybe this is the way to go, but I am unsure on how it would be best to implement it?
Once I've processed a keyword at the "bottom level", the program will expect a particular format of the following lines depending on the actual keyword. In principle each keyword will be handled differently, but here there is also potential for some code reuse by defining different "types" of keywords depending on what the program expects to do after triggering the reading of it. Common task include e.g. parsing an integer or a double array, but in principle it could be anything!
If a keyword for some reason cannot be correctly processed, the program should attempt as far as possible to use default values instead of terminating the program (if reasonable), but an error message should be written to a logfile. For optional keywords, default values will of course also be used.
In order to summarise, therefore, my main questions are the following:
1. Do you think think my approach of storing the relevant lines in a std::vector<std::string> to be reasonable?
This will of course require me to do a lot of "indexing work" to keep track of where in the vector the different keywords are located. Or should I work more "directly" with the original std::ifstream object? Or something else?
2. Given such a vector storing the lines of the text file, how I can I best go about detecting the keywords and start reading the information following them?
Here I will need to take account of possible ordering and whether a keyword is required or not. Also, I need to check if the lines following each "bottom level" keyword is in the format expected in each case.
One idea I've had is to store the keywords in different containers depending on whether they are optional or not (or maybe use object(s) of type std::map<std::string,bool>), and then remove them from the container(s) if correctly processed, but I am not sure exactly how I should go about it..
I guess there is really a thousand different ways one could answer these questions, but I would be grateful if someone more experienced could share some ideas on how to proceed. Is there e.g. a "standard" way of doing such things? Of course, a lot of details will also depend on the concrete application, but I think the general format indicated here can be used in a lot of different applications without a lot of tinkering if programmed in a good way!
UPDATE
Ok, so let my try to be more concrete. My current application is supposed to be a reservoir simulator, so as part of the input I need information about the grid/mesh, about rock and fluid properties, about wells/boundary conditions throughout the simulation and so on. At the moment I've been thinking about using (almost) the same set-up as the commercial Eclipse simulator when it comes to input, for details see
http://petrofaq.org/wiki/Eclipse_Input_Data.
However, I will probably change things a bit, so nothing is set in stone. Also, I am interested in making a more general "KeywordReader" class that with slight modifications can be adapted for use in other applications as well, at least it can be done in a reasonable amount of time.
As an example, I can post the current code that does the initial scan of the text file and locates the positions of the main keywords. As I said, I don't really like my solution very much, but it seems to work for what it needs to do.
At the top of the .cpp file I have the following namespace:
//Keywords used for reading input:
namespace KEYWORDS{
/*
* Main keywords and corresponding boolean values to signify whether or not they are required as input.
*/
enum MKEY{RUNSPEC = 0, GRID = 1, EDIT = 2, PROPS = 3, REGIONS = 4, SOLUTION = 5, SUMMARY =6, SCHEDULE = 7};
std::string mainKeywords[] = {std::string("RUNSPEC"), std::string("GRID"), std::string("EDIT"), std::string("PROPS"),
std::string("REGIONS"), std::string("SOLUTION"), std::string("SUMMARY"), std::string("SCHEDULE")};
bool required[] = {true,true,false,true,false,true,false,true};
const int n_key = 8;
}//end KEYWORDS namespace
Then further down I have the following function. I am not sure how understandable it is though..
bool InputReader::scanForMainKeywords(){
logfile << "Opening file.." << std::endl;
std::ifstream infile(filename);
//Test if file was opened. If not, write error message:
if(!infile.is_open()){
logfile << "ERROR: Could not open file! Unable to proceed!" << std::endl;
std::cout << "ERROR: Could not open file! Unable to proceed!" << std::endl;
return false;
}
else{
logfile << "Scanning for main keywords..." << std::endl;
int nkey = KEYWORDS::n_key;
//Initially no keywords have been found:
startIndex = std::vector<int>(nkey, -1);
stopIndex = std::vector<int>(nkey, -1);
//Variable used to control that the keywords are written in the correct order:
int foundIndex = -1;
//STATISTICS:
int lineCount = 0;//number of non-comment lines in text file
int commentCount = 0;//number of commented lines in text file
int emptyCount = 0;//number of empty lines in text file
//Create lines vector:
lines = std::vector<std::string>();
//Remove comments and empty lines from text file and store the result in the variable file_lines:
std::string str;
while(std::getline(infile,str)){
if(str.size()>=1 && str.at(0)=='*'){
commentCount++;
}
else if(str.size()>=2 && str.at(0)=='-' && str.at(1)=='-'){
commentCount++;
}
else if(str.size()==0){
emptyCount++;
}
else{
//Found a non-empty, non-comment line.
lines.push_back(str);//store in std::vector
//Start by checking if the first word of the line is one of the main keywords. If so, store the location of the keyword:
std::string fw = IO::getFirstWord(str);
for(int i=0;i<nkey;i++){
if(fw.compare(KEYWORDS::mainKeywords[i])==0){
if(i > foundIndex){
//Found a valid keyword!
foundIndex = i;
startIndex[i] = lineCount;//store where the keyword was found!
//logfile << "Keyword " << fw << " found at line " << lineCount << " in lines array!" << std::endl;
//std::cout << "Keyword " << fw << " found at line " << lineCount << " in lines array!" << std::endl;
break;//fw cannot equal several different keywords at the same time!
}
else{
//we have found a keyword, but in the wrong order... Terminate program:
std::cout << "ERROR: Keywords have been entered in the wrong order or been repeated! Cannot continue initialisation!" << std::endl;
logfile << "ERROR: Keywords have been entered in the wrong order or been repeated! Cannot continue initialisation!" << std::endl;
return false;
}
}
}//end for loop
lineCount++;
}//end else (found non-comment, non-empty line)
}//end while (reading ifstream)
logfile << "\n";
logfile << "FILE STATISTICS:" << std::endl;
logfile << "Number of commented lines: " << commentCount << std::endl;
logfile << "Number of non-commented lines: " << lineCount << std::endl;
logfile << "Number of empty lines: " << emptyCount << std::endl;
logfile << "\n";
/*
Print lines vector to screen:
for(int i=0;i<lines.size();i++){
std:: cout << "Line nr. " << i << " : " << lines[i] << std::endl;
}*/
/*
* So far, no keywords have been entered in the wrong order, but have all the necessary ones been found?
* Otherwise return false.
*/
for(int i=0;i<nkey;i++){
if(KEYWORDS::required[i] && startIndex[i] == -1){
logfile << "ERROR: Incorrect input of required keywords! At least " << KEYWORDS::mainKeywords[i] << " is missing!" << std::endl;;
logfile << "Cannot proceed with initialisation!" << std::endl;
std::cout << "ERROR: Incorrect input of required keywords! At least " << KEYWORDS::mainKeywords[i] << " is missing!" << std::endl;
std::cout << "Cannot proceed with initialisation!" << std::endl;
return false;
}
}
//If everything is in order, we also initialise the stopIndex array correctly:
int counter = 0;
//Find first existing keyword:
while(counter < nkey && startIndex[counter] == -1){
//Keyword doesn't exist. Leave stopindex at -1!
counter++;
}
//Store stop index of each keyword:
while(counter<nkey){
int offset = 1;
//Find next existing keyword:
while(counter+offset < nkey && startIndex[counter+offset] == -1){
offset++;
}
if(counter+offset < nkey){
stopIndex[counter] = startIndex[counter+offset]-1;
}
else{
//reached the end of array!
stopIndex[counter] = lines.size()-1;
}
counter += offset;
}//end while
/*
//Print out start/stop-index arrays to screen:
for(int i=0;i<nkey;i++){
std::cout << "Start index of " << KEYWORDS::mainKeywords[i] << " is : " << startIndex[i] << std::endl;
std::cout << "Stop index of " << KEYWORDS::mainKeywords[i] << " is : " << stopIndex[i] << std::endl;
}
*/
return true;
}//end else (file opened properly)
}//end scanForMainKeywords()
You say your purpose is to read initialization data from a text file.
Seems you need to parse (syntax analyze) this file and store the data under the right keys.
If the syntax is fixed and each construction starts with a keyword, you could write a recursive descent (LL1) parser creating a tree (each node is a stl vector of sub-branches) to store your data.
If the syntax is free, you might pick JSON or XML and use an existing parsing library.
Is there a way thorough which I can see what character occupies a certain coordinate. Let's say I have the following output:
Hello World !
I want to able to to see the x character on the y line. Something like:
readCoordinates(0,3);
This function should return 'l' , because the 4th character (because I started counting from 0) from the 1st line is 'l'. Can I do this type of readings in C++ from an already printed string ?
You might consider defining your own custom print function, which logs in a vector everything you've already outputted to the console. That way, you could easily grab a character, or string, from the console.
It might take up a lot of memory, however, if you're outputting thousands of lines.
You could do this from the string that is printed, but after it is printed it is just pixels on a screen, or ink on a printer. So, the answer is no, unless you have e.g. a vision system to look around and see where it was printed, recognize the letters and lines, and figure out the coordinates.
"Can I do this type of readings in C++ from an already printed string ?"
Good approach would be to store output of your program in memory so that your function readCoordinates could access random character in O(1). I would definitely use std::vector<std::string> outputBuffer which would allow you something like this: outputBuffer[0][3].
Example:
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <string>
std::vector<std::string> outputBuffer;
char readCoordinates(int line, int character)
{
if (line < outputBuffer.size() && character < outputBuffer[line].size())
return outputBuffer[line][character];
return 0;
}
int main()
{
std::string myOutput("Hello World !");
outputBuffer.push_back(myOutput);
std::cout << myOutput << std::endl;
if (char c = readCoordinates(0, 3))
std::cout << c << std::endl;
}
output:
Hello World !
l
TL;DR I need to know which characters are deleted with Win32.
Basically, I need to know what characters are deleted, each time they are. Considering that there are three methods to delete, (Backspace, delete, and Right click>Delete) I'm not sure if I'll just be re-using the same code or what. There's also the option of multiple characters being selected, as well as the option for undo/redo. There's probably something else I'm missing.
As I said above, I need to know which characters are deleted, and how to use undo/redo and how to tell if when using those if characters were added or deleted. (If that's something easily Google, tell me, I just thought of them as I've been writting this post)
What exactly are you talking about? The win32 default control windows? You can subclass them to do that...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb773183%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Well, if you come up with something specific code-wise and don't quite know what to do, just ask here and see if someone can't help you.
With regard to undo/redo, I believe it all depends on the size of the focus area, and I'm not sure how MS does it for, say, Word, or Excel, etc.
But for short stuff, what I posted above should work in a universal sense, but apparently not in your case.
Nevertheless, if anyone wanted to shorten the iteration in the above, they could replace the loop above by starting right at the end of shorter string, like this --
for(int i = iLen2, x=0; i < iLen1; i++, x++)
szAnswer[x]=str1[i];
This simply confines the interation to the missing characters.
Here is a small Win32 Console application that will demonstrate a very simple way to determine which characters have been deleted. You can easily adapt this to a Win32 App, add iterations to it, and so on
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
#ifndef MAX_PATH
#define MAX_PATH 256
#endif
int main()
{
int iLen1, iLen2, iResult;
char str1[]="The old red box.";
char str2[]="The old red";
char szAnswer[MAX_PATH]="";
// strcmp() will be greather than 0
// if str1 is longer than str2
if(strcmp(str1, str2) > 0)
{
iLen1=strlen(str1);
iLen2=strlen(str2);
iResult=iLen1-iLen2;
cout << "The number of missing characters is " << iResult << endl << endl;
// now lets see which characters are missing
// we iterate through the entire length
// of str1, which is the full text, but
// we only start puting characters into our
// result when we get to the end of str2
for(int i=0, x=0; i < iLen1; i++)
{
if(i >= iLen2)
{
szAnswer[x++]=str1[i];
}
}
cout << endl << "The missing characters are --" << endl << endl << szAnswer << endl << endl;
}
return 0;
}