Creating a while loop which increases by one - c++

Question

Below is the prompt that I have:
Write a while loop that prints 1 to userNum, using the variable i.
Follow each number (even the last one) by a space. Assume userNum is positive.
Ex: userNum = 4 prints:
1 2 3 4
I've tried a few things and below is the code that I have so far:
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
int userNum = 0;
int i = 0;
userNum = 4; // Assume positive
cout<<("userNum = %d\n",userNum);
while(i != userNum) {
i++;
cout<<("%d",i);
}
cout << endl;
return 0;
}
The output is close to whats needed but its not correct and I cant seem to figure out what I did wrong.
the output is 41234
Could someone please guide me in the right direction as to what I did incorrectly?

Answer 1

The basic mechanism for this is something like this:
#include <iostream>
int main() {
int i = 0;
int userNum = 0;
userNum = 4;
while(i < userNum) {
++i;
std::cout<<i<<" ";
}
}
Output:
1 2 3 4
You could initialize userNum to be from cin if you'd like, naturally.

Answer 2

The problem is because of this line: cout<<("userNum = %d\n",userNum).
cout does not support a formatting like that. And this resulted in a weird behaviour: it skipped the userNum = part and just printed userNum as int value, which is the first number 4 in your output.
Try to consider the following code instead:
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
int userNum = 0;
int i = 0;
userNum = 4; // Assume positive
cout << "userNum = " << userNum << endl;
while (i != userNum) {
i++;
cout << i;
}
cout << endl;
return 0;
}
The output will be
userNum = 4
1234
as you would've expected. There are many other good sources on how to use string formatting out there. I'll give some links here but it should be easy for you to search them as well.
Link 1 - cplusplus.com - basic input/output
Link 2 - SOF
I hope it helped.