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#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
const int ArrSize = 400;
int main()
{
char arr1[ArrSize];
char arr2[ArrSize];
char arr3[ArrSize];
cout << "enter the first string ";
cin >> arr1;
cout << "enter the second string ";
cin.get(arr2, ArrSize);
cout << "enter the thrid string ";
cin>>arr3;
cout << endl << endl;
cout << "first string is: " << arr1 << "\n";
cout << "second string is: " << arr2 << "\n";
cout << "thrid string is: " << arr3 << "\n";
return 0;
}
execution result is
input :
"abc\n"
output :
first string is: abc
second string is:
thrid string is:(strange characters)
Can you explain why the second cin didn't get input?
I expected that cin would read leading white spaces form the stream buffer and ignore them and read new string.
Let's start by adjusting the program to check for errors.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
const int ArrSize = 400;
int main()
{
char arr1[ArrSize];
char arr2[ArrSize];
char arr3[ArrSize];
cout << "enter the first string ";
if (!(cin >> arr1))
{
cout << "Failed cin >> arr1\n";
}
cout << "enter the second string ";
if (!cin.get(arr2, ArrSize))
{
cout << "Failed cin.get(arr2, ArrSize)\n";
}
cout << "enter the third string ";
if (!(cin>>arr3))
{
cout << "Failed cin >> arr3\n";
}
cout << endl << endl;
cout << "first string is: " << arr1 << "\n";
cout << "second string is: " << arr2 << "\n";
cout << "third string is: " << arr3 << "\n";
return 0;
}
The results should be something like
enter the first string abc
enter the second string Failed cin.get(arr2, ArrSize)
enter the third string Failed cin >> arr3
first string is: abc
second string is:
third string is: <garbage here>
We can see that the second and third reads failed. Why is that? To find out, we need to do a little reading. Here's some high-quality documentation for std::istream::get
The relevant overload is number 3, but 3 just calls number 4 with the delimiter set to '\n' and 4 says two important things,
Characters are extracted and stored until any of the following occurs:
count-1 characters have been stored
end of file condition occurs in the input sequence (setstate(eofbit) is called)
the next available input character c equals delim, as determined by Traits::eq(c, delim). This character is not extracted (unlike basic_istream::getline())
If no characters were extracted, calls setstate(failbit). In any case, if count>0, a null character (CharT() is stored in the next successive location of the array.
So if you only get a newline, delim in this case, the output string arr2 is null terminated and the stream is placed into fail state because no characters were extracted from the stream, making the stream unreadable until the failure is acknowledged by clearing it. This is what we are seeing: an empty string and fail bit.
Why is the string empty? Why didn't it prompt for input? Because cin >> arr1 reads one whitespace-delimited token from the stream. It will ignore all whitespace up to the start of the token, but it leaves the whitespace after the token in the stream.
If you type abc and hit enter, "abc\n" goes into the stream. cin >> arr1 reads "abc" into arr1. The "\n" stays in the stream where cin.get(arr2, ArrSize) finds it. The get exit condition is immediately satisfied by the "\n", so get stops and leaves the "\n" in the stream. No characters were extracted. Fail bit is set and arr2 is null terminated.
cin>>arr3 subsequently fails because you can't read from a failed stream. Nothing is placed in arr3, so when arr3 is printed, it is unterminated and << keeps printing until it finds a terminator. This is the garbage characters, though technically anything can happen.
The question does not specify what is to be done with data left over after cin >> arr1. Common solutions are to remove everything up to and including the newline character from the stream with
cin.ignore(numeric_limits<streamsize>::max(), '\n');
but if you want to use any characters left on the line for arr2, you'll have to be trickier. For example, always read lines, build an istringstream out of the line, and then parse the istringstream as is done in option 2 of this answer.
Side note: Reading into character arrays with >> is always risky because it will keep reading until whitespace is found. If the program reads the size of the array from the stream without finding whitepace, sucks to be you. get knows to stop before its overflowed. >> doesn't. On the other hand, get will read until it finds the end of the line, not just a single whitespace delimited token.
>> into a std::string will do the right thing and resize the string to fit the input. Generally prefer std::string to char arrays. And if you are using std::string prefer std::getline to get or istream's getline.
I wrote a very basic program in C++ which asked the user to input a number and then a string. To my surprise, when running the program it never stopped to ask for the string. It just skipped over it. After doing some reading on StackOverflow, I found out that I needed to add a line that said:
cin.ignore(256, '\n');
before the line that gets the string input. Adding that fixed the problem and made the program work. My question is why does C++ need this cin.ignore() line and how can I predict when I will need to use cin.ignore()?
Here is the program I wrote:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
double num;
string mystr;
cout << "Please enter a number: " << "\n";
cin >> num;
cout << "Your number is: " << num << "\n";
cin.ignore(256, '\n'); // Why do I need this line?
cout << "Please enter your name: \n";
getline (cin, mystr);
cout << "So your name is " << mystr << "?\n";
cout << "Have a nice day. \n";
}
ignore does exactly what the name implies.
It doesn't "throw away" something you don't need. Instead, it ignores the number of characters you specify when you call it, up to the char you specify as a delimiter.
It works with both input and output buffers.
Essentially, for std::cin statements you use ignore before you do a getline call, because when a user inputs something with std::cin, they hit enter and a '\n' char gets into the cin buffer. Then if you use getline, it gets the newline char instead of the string you want. So you do a std::cin.ignore(1000,'\n') and that should clear the buffer up to the string that you want. (The 1000 is put there to skip over a specific number of chars before the specified delimiter, in this case, the '\n' newline character.)
You're thinking about this the wrong way. You're thinking in logical steps each time cin or getline is used. Ex. First ask for a number, then ask for a name. That is the wrong way to think about cin. So you run into a race condition because you assume the stream is clear each time you ask for a input.
If you write your program purely for input you'll find the problem:
int main()
{
double num;
string mystr;
cin >> num;
getline(cin, mystr);
cout << "num=" << num << ",mystr=\'" << mystr << "\'" << endl;
}
In the above, you are thinking, "first get a number." So you type in 123 press enter, and your output will be num=123,mystr=''. Why is that? It's because in the stream you have 123\n and the 123 is parsed into the num variable while \n is still in the stream. Reading the doc for getline function by default it will look in the istream until a \n is encountered. In this example, since \n is in the stream, it looks like it "skipped" it but it worked properly.
For the above to work, you'll have to enter 123Hello World which will properly output num=123,mystr='Hello World'. That, or you put a cin.ignore between the cin and getline so that it'll break into logical steps that you expect.
This is why you need the ignore command. Because you are thinking of it in logical steps rather than in a stream form so you run into a race condition.
Take another code example that is commonly found in schools:
int main()
{
int age;
string firstName;
string lastName;
cout << "First name: ";
cin >> firstName;
cout << "Last name: ";
cin >> lastName;
cout << "Age: ";
cin >> age;
cout << "Hello " << firstName << " " << lastName << "! You are " << age << " years old!" << endl;
}
The above seems to be in logical steps. First ask for first name, last name, then age. So if you did John enter, then Doe enter, then 19 enter, the application works each logic step. If you think of it in "streams" you can simply enter John Doe 19 on the "First name:" question and it would work as well and appear to skip the remaining questions. For the above to work in logical steps, you would need to ignore the remaining stream for each logical break in questions.
Just remember to think of your program input as it is reading from a "stream" and not in logical steps. Each time you call cin it is being read from a stream. This creates a rather buggy application if the user enters the wrong input. For example, if you entered a character where a cin >> double is expected, the application will produce a seemingly bizarre output.
Short answer
Why? Because there is still whitespace (carriage returns, tabs, spaces, newline) left in the input stream.
When? When you are using some function which does not on their own ignores the leading whitespaces. Cin by default ignores and removes the leading whitespace but getline does not ignore the leading whitespace on its own.
Now a detailed answer.
Everything you input in the console is read from the standard stream stdin. When you enter something, let's say 256 in your case and press enter, the contents of the stream become 256\n. Now cin picks up 256 and removes it from the stream and \n still remaining in the stream.
Now next when you enter your name, let's say Raddicus, the new contents of the stream is \nRaddicus.
Now here comes the catch.
When you try to read a line using getline, if not provided any delimiter as the third argument, getline by default reads till the newline character and removes the newline character from the stream.
So on calling new line, getline reads and discards \n from the stream and resulting in an empty string read in mystr which appears like getline is skipped (but it's not) because there was already an newline in the stream, getline will not prompt for input as it has already read what it was supposed to read.
Now, how does cin.ignore help here?
According to the ignore documentation extract from cplusplus.com-
istream& ignore (streamsize n = 1, int delim = EOF);
Extracts characters from the input sequence and discards them, until
either n characters have been extracted, or one compares equal to
delim.
The function also stops extracting characters if the end-of-file is
reached. If this is reached prematurely (before either extracting n
characters or finding delim), the function sets the eofbit flag.
So, cin.ignore(256, '\n');, ignores first 256 characters or all the character untill it encounters delimeter (here \n in your case), whichever comes first (here \n is the first character, so it ignores until \n is encountered).
Just for your reference, If you don't exactly know how many characters to skip and your sole purpose is to clear the stream to prepare for reading a string using getline or cin you should use cin.ignore(numeric_limits<streamsize>::max(),'\n').
Quick explanation: It ignores the characters equal to maximum size of stream or until a '\n' is encountered, whichever case happens first.
When you want to throw away a specific number of characters from the input stream manually.
A very common use case is using this to safely ignore newline characters since cin will sometimes leave newline characters that you will have to go over to get to the next line of input.
Long story short it gives you flexibility when handling stream input.
Ignore function is used to skip(discard/throw away) characters in the input stream. Ignore file is associated with the file istream.
Consider the function below
ex: cin.ignore(120,'/n');
the particular function skips the next 120 input character or to skip the characters until a newline character is read.
As pointed right by many other users. It's because there may be whitespace or a newline character.
Consider the following code, it removes all the duplicate characters from a given string.
#include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
int t;
cin>>t;
cin.ignore(); //Notice that this cin.ignore() is really crucial for any extra whitespace or newline character
while(t--){
vector<int> v(256,0);
string s;
getline(cin,s);
string s2;
for(int i=0;i<s.size();i++){
if (v[s[i]]) continue;
else{
s2.push_back(s[i]);
v[s[i]]++;
}
}
cout<<s2<<endl;
}
return 0;
}
So, You get the point that it will ignore those unwanted inputs and will get the job done.
It is better to use scanf(" %[^\n]",str) in c++ than cin.ignore() after cin>> statement.To do that first you have to include < cstdio > header.
I wrote a very basic program in C++ which asked the user to input a number and then a string. To my surprise, when running the program it never stopped to ask for the string. It just skipped over it. After doing some reading on StackOverflow, I found out that I needed to add a line that said:
cin.ignore(256, '\n');
before the line that gets the string input. Adding that fixed the problem and made the program work. My question is why does C++ need this cin.ignore() line and how can I predict when I will need to use cin.ignore()?
Here is the program I wrote:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
double num;
string mystr;
cout << "Please enter a number: " << "\n";
cin >> num;
cout << "Your number is: " << num << "\n";
cin.ignore(256, '\n'); // Why do I need this line?
cout << "Please enter your name: \n";
getline (cin, mystr);
cout << "So your name is " << mystr << "?\n";
cout << "Have a nice day. \n";
}
ignore does exactly what the name implies.
It doesn't "throw away" something you don't need. Instead, it ignores the number of characters you specify when you call it, up to the char you specify as a delimiter.
It works with both input and output buffers.
Essentially, for std::cin statements you use ignore before you do a getline call, because when a user inputs something with std::cin, they hit enter and a '\n' char gets into the cin buffer. Then if you use getline, it gets the newline char instead of the string you want. So you do a std::cin.ignore(1000,'\n') and that should clear the buffer up to the string that you want. (The 1000 is put there to skip over a specific number of chars before the specified delimiter, in this case, the '\n' newline character.)
You're thinking about this the wrong way. You're thinking in logical steps each time cin or getline is used. Ex. First ask for a number, then ask for a name. That is the wrong way to think about cin. So you run into a race condition because you assume the stream is clear each time you ask for a input.
If you write your program purely for input you'll find the problem:
int main()
{
double num;
string mystr;
cin >> num;
getline(cin, mystr);
cout << "num=" << num << ",mystr=\'" << mystr << "\'" << endl;
}
In the above, you are thinking, "first get a number." So you type in 123 press enter, and your output will be num=123,mystr=''. Why is that? It's because in the stream you have 123\n and the 123 is parsed into the num variable while \n is still in the stream. Reading the doc for getline function by default it will look in the istream until a \n is encountered. In this example, since \n is in the stream, it looks like it "skipped" it but it worked properly.
For the above to work, you'll have to enter 123Hello World which will properly output num=123,mystr='Hello World'. That, or you put a cin.ignore between the cin and getline so that it'll break into logical steps that you expect.
This is why you need the ignore command. Because you are thinking of it in logical steps rather than in a stream form so you run into a race condition.
Take another code example that is commonly found in schools:
int main()
{
int age;
string firstName;
string lastName;
cout << "First name: ";
cin >> firstName;
cout << "Last name: ";
cin >> lastName;
cout << "Age: ";
cin >> age;
cout << "Hello " << firstName << " " << lastName << "! You are " << age << " years old!" << endl;
}
The above seems to be in logical steps. First ask for first name, last name, then age. So if you did John enter, then Doe enter, then 19 enter, the application works each logic step. If you think of it in "streams" you can simply enter John Doe 19 on the "First name:" question and it would work as well and appear to skip the remaining questions. For the above to work in logical steps, you would need to ignore the remaining stream for each logical break in questions.
Just remember to think of your program input as it is reading from a "stream" and not in logical steps. Each time you call cin it is being read from a stream. This creates a rather buggy application if the user enters the wrong input. For example, if you entered a character where a cin >> double is expected, the application will produce a seemingly bizarre output.
Short answer
Why? Because there is still whitespace (carriage returns, tabs, spaces, newline) left in the input stream.
When? When you are using some function which does not on their own ignores the leading whitespaces. Cin by default ignores and removes the leading whitespace but getline does not ignore the leading whitespace on its own.
Now a detailed answer.
Everything you input in the console is read from the standard stream stdin. When you enter something, let's say 256 in your case and press enter, the contents of the stream become 256\n. Now cin picks up 256 and removes it from the stream and \n still remaining in the stream.
Now next when you enter your name, let's say Raddicus, the new contents of the stream is \nRaddicus.
Now here comes the catch.
When you try to read a line using getline, if not provided any delimiter as the third argument, getline by default reads till the newline character and removes the newline character from the stream.
So on calling new line, getline reads and discards \n from the stream and resulting in an empty string read in mystr which appears like getline is skipped (but it's not) because there was already an newline in the stream, getline will not prompt for input as it has already read what it was supposed to read.
Now, how does cin.ignore help here?
According to the ignore documentation extract from cplusplus.com-
istream& ignore (streamsize n = 1, int delim = EOF);
Extracts characters from the input sequence and discards them, until
either n characters have been extracted, or one compares equal to
delim.
The function also stops extracting characters if the end-of-file is
reached. If this is reached prematurely (before either extracting n
characters or finding delim), the function sets the eofbit flag.
So, cin.ignore(256, '\n');, ignores first 256 characters or all the character untill it encounters delimeter (here \n in your case), whichever comes first (here \n is the first character, so it ignores until \n is encountered).
Just for your reference, If you don't exactly know how many characters to skip and your sole purpose is to clear the stream to prepare for reading a string using getline or cin you should use cin.ignore(numeric_limits<streamsize>::max(),'\n').
Quick explanation: It ignores the characters equal to maximum size of stream or until a '\n' is encountered, whichever case happens first.
When you want to throw away a specific number of characters from the input stream manually.
A very common use case is using this to safely ignore newline characters since cin will sometimes leave newline characters that you will have to go over to get to the next line of input.
Long story short it gives you flexibility when handling stream input.
Ignore function is used to skip(discard/throw away) characters in the input stream. Ignore file is associated with the file istream.
Consider the function below
ex: cin.ignore(120,'/n');
the particular function skips the next 120 input character or to skip the characters until a newline character is read.
As pointed right by many other users. It's because there may be whitespace or a newline character.
Consider the following code, it removes all the duplicate characters from a given string.
#include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
int t;
cin>>t;
cin.ignore(); //Notice that this cin.ignore() is really crucial for any extra whitespace or newline character
while(t--){
vector<int> v(256,0);
string s;
getline(cin,s);
string s2;
for(int i=0;i<s.size();i++){
if (v[s[i]]) continue;
else{
s2.push_back(s[i]);
v[s[i]]++;
}
}
cout<<s2<<endl;
}
return 0;
}
So, You get the point that it will ignore those unwanted inputs and will get the job done.
It is better to use scanf(" %[^\n]",str) in c++ than cin.ignore() after cin>> statement.To do that first you have to include < cstdio > header.
Here is my code:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <fstream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
string nom_fich("data.dat");
ofstream fichier(nom_fich.c_str());
string name;
cout <<"The name is: "<< name ;
cin>>ws;
if (getline(cin, name)){
fichier << name <<endl;
} else {
cerr <<"Error!";
}
fichier.close();
return 0;
}
Question: why if I enter a number instead of a string my program doesn't say me "Error!" ?
EDIT: how can I attempt to my purpose ? I want that get an "Error!" when I enter a type that isn't a type string.
Because a number is a valid string.
Numbers can be represented as strings, i.e. strings can contain digit characters. For example:
std::string my_string("42");
std::cout << my_string[0]; // prints 4
std::cout << my_string[1]; // prints 2
You can't enter a number. You can enter a sequence of characters that can be interpreted as a number, but that sequence is still characters. Those characters arw what getline reads.
A number can be represented as a string, so std::ifstream::operator >> takes the intuitive approach: it treats any sequence of non-blank characters as a string. This includes decimal digits as well.
Unrelated, but instead of creating a superfluous nom_fich temporary variable for the name, you could just write ofstream fichier("data.dat");.
Because the string "123" is just as valid as the string "abc", or the string "def999".
As for "how can I attempt to my purpose?", you'd have to explain to us what your purpose is because, by your own admission, your own code does not describe that purpose and therefore we cannot extract your purpose from it.
Reading a number as a string will certainly work: the number is just represented as a sequence of characters. If you want the stream to attempt reading a number and fail if it doesn't get one, you'd use a different type to read, e.g.:
int number;
if (std::cin >> number) {
std::cout << "ERROR: read a number: " << number << '\n';
}
else if (std::cin.clear(), std::getline(std::cin, name)) {
std::cout << "read a name: " << name << '\n';
}
After the unsuccessful read of a number the stream's state is clear()ed and, instead, it is attempted to read a name. There is a subtle issue as the formatted input for an int will skip leading whitespace while std::getline() doesn't skip whitespace. If skipping leading whitespace is a problem just use the manipulator std::noskipws before trying to read an int.
Why does this program run fine?
#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
cout <<"What year was your house built?\n";
int year;
cin >> year;
cout << "What is its street address?\n";
char address[80];
cin>>address;
cout << "Year built: " << year << endl;
cout << "Address: " << address << endl;
cout << "Done!\n";
return 0;
}
And why does this program not give the chance to enter the address?
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
using namespace std;
cout <<"What year was your house built?\n";
int year;
cin >> year;
cout << "What is its street address?\n";
char address[80];
cin.getline(address, 80);
cout << "Year built: " << year << endl;
cout << "Address: " << address << endl;
cout << "Done!\n";
return 0;
}
cin>> leaves the newline character (\n) in the iostream. If getline is used after cin>>, the getline sees this newline character as leading whitespace, thinks it is finished and stops reading any further.
Two ways to solve the problem:
Avoid putting getline after cin >>
OR
Consume the trailing newline character from the cin>> before calling getline, by "grabbing" it and putting it into a "dummy" variable.
string dummy;
getline(cin, dummy);
Why does the first program work & Second doesn't?
First Program:
The cin statement uses the entered year and leaves the \n in the stream as garbage. The cin statement does NOT read (or "grab") \n. The cin ignores \n when reading data. So cin in program 1 can read the data properly.
Second Program:
The getline, reads and grabs \n. So, when it sees the \n left out from cin, it grabs the \n and thinks it is finished reading, resulting in second program not working as you expected.
Sit down for a second. This is not easy to explain properly.
When your program gets to a point where it reads from std::cin, it does not just automatically wait for you to type something. std::cin is an input stream, the same as you use to read from a file on disk. The only reason it waits is if there is not enough data available yet to satisfy the read request.
Meanwhile, when you run your program from the console, the console window itself is also a program. It is interpreting your key presses and translating them into text, and feeding that text a line at a time to the standard input of your program (so that std::cin can see it). This is important and useful, because it allows the backspace key to work the way you expect it to.
So if your program is supposed to read a number, and you type a number, your program will not see the number until you hit return to complete the line. However, the newline character is still sitting in the input stream, because you didn't read it yet. The operator>> skips whitespace before the value that it's trying to read, but it leaves behind any whitespace after the value.
Now, if the next reading operation is another call to operator>>, then it does the same thing again and it works fine: the newline that we didn't read before is whitespace, so it gets skipped, and then the next thing gets read.
However, the getline() function reads from the current point until the next newline. It never skips any leading or trailing whitespace, and an empty line is considered completely valid. So if you typed a number and hit return, then the getline() call will see the newline and finish reading right away, because it already has an end of the line. The program does not stop because there was already enough data available to finish the operation.
To fix this, the safest, simplest and most robust way of dealing with the input is to always read the entire line first, and then re-interpret the contents of the line. To make this easier, we will use the std::string class to represent strings. We can read into the string instance with std::getline (notice: a global function, not a member function of cin), and create a std::stringstream instance from that string.
The idea is: the program will always wait at an input request, because the previous request always read the newline character (because we read the entire line). So that makes the control flow work the way we expected it to. The std::stringstream instance can be treated like a file or standard input: it's just another stream, except it takes its data from the string. So we can get numbers out of it with operator>>, and so on.
The other benefit of this comes when the user inputs invalid data. It can be quite hard to recover from this properly, if you are just reading directly from std::cin. But if you are using the stringstream as a "buffer", then you can just throw it away and try again with a new line of input.
An example:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <sstream>
int main()
{
using namespace std;
string line;
int year;
while (true) {
cout << "What year was your house built?" << endl;
getline(cin, line);
stringstream input(line);
if (line >> year) { break; }
}
cout << "What is its street address?\n";
getline(cin, line);
cout << "Year built: " << year << endl;
cout << "Address: " << line << endl;
cout << "Done!\n";
}
Maybe you have a stray terminator in cin?|
Try cin.clear();