Reading information out of a structured array - c++

Question

I am working on an assignment which has the following goals:
Store user provided customer info into an array of structs.
Write functions to add, display all or retrieve a customer(s).
I have an issue with writing my findCust (retrieval routine). I would like to prompt the user for a first and last name of any customer, and then to find the relevant customer in the array of customers and print out their information. I'm kind of stuck and not sure how to proceed.
This is what I have so far:
void findCust(Customer customers[], int loc)
{
string name;
const int t = 100;
cout << "\nEnter the name of the customer you would like to look up: ";
getline(cin, name);
cout << endl;
for (int i = 0; i <= loc; i++) {
}
}
This is how the Customer struct is:
struct Customer {
string firstname;
string lastname;
Address home;
Address business;
};
Here's my main function:
int main() {
title("Customer Contact Menu");
int choice = 0;
int loc = 0;
const int SIZE = 100;
Customer contacts[SIZE];
while (choice < 5) {
choice = displayMenu();
switch (choice) {
case 1:
contacts[loc] = getCustomer();
loc++;
break;
case 2:
for (int x = 0; x < loc; x++) {
showCustomer(contacts[x]);
}
break;
case 3:
findCust(contacts,loc);
break;
case 4:
endProg();
}
}
}
I want to know how exactly to read information stored in the customer array, and compare it to the user input. I tried using a customer.compare command, I've tried a few things as well, I tried a linear search etc. But the problem with this is user input can't be compared to a structure. That's the part I'm stuck on.

Answer 1

If I understood your question correctly you want to read and find a customer, and then print their information. In order to do this I would structure the function like so:
void findCust(Customer customers[], int array_size)
{
string first_name, last_name;
cout << "\nEnter the name of the customer you would like to look up: ";
cin >> first_name >> last_name;
for (int i = 0; i < array_size; i++) {
}
}
Inside the for loop you can run a linear search and just iterate over all the customers and compare them. i.e. Go through the array and for each customers[i].firstname and customers[i].lastname check if they match the first_name and last_name variables.
If they do then call print(customers[i]) which is the function that will print out the given customer. You can have the function's definition be similar to void print(Customer customer) and this can contain all the printing to the stream.
Hopefully that helps you get started.