I am trying to write a function in my program that loads a huge text-file of 216,555 words and put them as strings into a set. This works properly, but as expected, it will hang for a few micro seconds while looping through the file. But there is something funky going on with my loop, and it's not behaving properly. Please take the time to read, I am sure there's a valid reason for this, but I have no idea what to search for.
The code, which is working by the way, is this:
ifstream dictionary;
dictionary.open("Dictionary.txt");
if(dictionary.fail())
{
cout<<"Could not find Dictionary.txt. Exiting."<<endl;
exit(0);
}
int i = 0;
int progress = 216555/50;
cout<<"Loading dictionary..."<<endl;
cout<<"< >"<<endl;
cout<<"<";
for(string line; getline(dictionary, line);)
{
usleep(1); //Explanation below (not the hangtime)
i++;
if(i%progress == 0)
cout<<"=";
words.insert(line);
}
The for-loop gets every string from the file, and inserts them in the map.
This is a console-application, and I want the user to see the progress. It's not much of a delay, but I wanted to do it anyway. If you don't understand the code, I'll try to explain.
When the program starts, it first prints out "Loading Dictionary...", and then a "<" and a ">" separated by 50 spaces. Then on the next line: "<" followed by a "=" for every 433 word it loops through (216555/50). The purpose of this is so the user can see the progress. The wanted output half way through the loop would be like this:
Loading dictionary...
< >
<=========================
My problem is:
The correct output is shown, but not at the expected time. It prints out the full progress bar, but that only after it has hanged and are done with the loop. How is that possible? The correct number of '=' are shown, but they all pop out at the same time, AFTER it hangs for some microseconds. I added the usleep(1) to make the hangtime a bit longer, but the same thing happened. The if-statement clearly works, or the '=' would've never showed at all, but it feels like my program is stacking the cout-calls for after the entire loop.
The weirdest thing of all, is that the last cout<<"<"; before the for-loop starts, is also shown at the same time as the rest of its line; after the loop is finished. Why and how?
You never flush the stream, so the output just goes into a buffer.
Change cout<<"="; to cout<<"="<<std::flush;
You need to flush the output stream.
cout << "=" << std::flush;
The program is "stacking the cout-calls". It's called output buffering, and every major operating system does it.
When in interactive mode (as your program is intended to be used), output is buffered by line; that is, it will be forced to the terminal when a newline is seen. You can also have block-buffered (fixed number of bytes between forced outputs; used when piping output) and unbuffered.
C++ provides the std::flush stream modifier to force an output at any point. It can be used like this:
cout << "=" << std::flush;
This will slow down your program a bit; the point of buffering is for efficiency. As you'll only be doing it about 51 times, though, the slowdown should be negligible.
Related
(New to C++)
I have this simple code (simplified for the question):
int main()
{
string currInput;
while (getline(cin, currInput))
{
}
cout << "wont be printed" << std::flush;
return 0;
}
I have been debugging for a while and I probably miss something:
When running it and pressing ctrl+d (after some strings or right away), it does not print the string that is after the while loop. It just stop running. I thought it might be something with flushing so I added that too.
What am I missing?
PS: When running in debug, it mentions something about sighup signal.
So, with a lot of help from #manni and #rici, we found the problem.
It turns out to be a known problem in cLion.
see sending EOF to stdin in Clion IDE
https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/206849765-How-to-enter-EOF-Ctrl-z-in-Run-console-
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-12514
Your error is the while loop. You should not be using a loop here. What happens is it hits this line and attempts to get input. Regardless of whether you type in anything or not, if you hit CTRL+D it will end the getline. But you have it in a while loop....so it'll hop back to the top of the loop and get another line...then another line....then another line. Welcome to your first infinite loop.
while (getline(cin, currInput))
{
}
The simplest thing would be to do just
getline(cin, currInput);
If you're starting out programming this is probably what you want to do anyway.
If you feel gutsy, read this page: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/string/getline/
You'll notice that getline returns the stream you pass in. Which will evaluate to true as far the loop is concerned.
This is my first question on stackoverflow. Pardon me if I haven't searched properly but I do not seem to find an explanation for this. Was just attempting an example from Bjourne Stroustroup's papers. Added my bits to see the array get re-sized as I type the text.
But it doesn't seem to work that way! getchar() simply waits till I am done with entering all the characters and then it will execute the loop. As per the logic, it doesn't actually go into the loop, get a character, perform its actions and then iterate. I am wondering if this is implementation specific, or intended to be like this?
I am on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS using Codeblocks with gcc 4.8.2. The source was in cpp files if that matters.
while(true)
{
int c = getchar();
if(c=='\n' || c==EOF)
{
text[i] = 0;
break;
}
text[i] = c;
if(i == maxsize-1)
{
maxsize = maxsize+maxsize;
text = (char*)realloc(text,maxsize);
if(text == 0) exit(1);
cout << "\n Increasing array size to " << maxsize << endl;
}
i++;
}
The output is as follows:
Array Size is now: 10
Please enter some text: this is some sample text. I would have liked to see the memory being realloced right here, but apparently that's not how it works!
Increasing array size to 20
Increasing array size to 40
Increasing array size to 80
Increasing array size to 160
You have entered: this is some sample text. I would have liked to see the memory being realloced right here, but apparently that's not how it works!
Array Size is now: 160
This has nothing to do with getchar directly. The "problem" is the underlying terminal, which will buffer your Input. The Input is sent to the program after you press enter. In Linux (dunno if there is a way in Windows) you can workaround this by calling
/bin/stty raw
in terminal or by calling
system ("/bin/stty raw");
in your program. This will cause getchar to immediately return the input character to you.
Dont forget to reset the tty behaviour by calling
/bin/stty cooked
when done!
Here is an example (for Linux):
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
system ("/bin/stty raw");
char c = getchar();
system ("/bin/stty cooked");
return 0;
}
Also have a look at this SO Post: How to avoid press enter with any getchar()
Also, as suggested in the comments, have a look here: http://linux.die.net/man/3/termios especially on the command tcsetattr, which should work cross-platform.
Actually, tcsetattr does not apply to Windows (which is what is commonly referred to in this site as "cross-platform"). However, the question is tagged for Linux, so "cross-platform" is a moot point.
By default the standard input, output and error streams are set to
line-buffered (input)
block-buffered (output)
line-buffered (error)
You can change that using setbuf, but of course will not solve the problem (the answer calls for single-character input). POSIX terminal I/O (termios) lets you change via a system call any of the flags shown using stty. As a rule, you might call stty directly from a script, rarely from a C program.
Reading a single character is a frequently asked question, e.g.,
How can I read single characters from the terminal? (unix-faq)
How can I read a single character from the keyboard without waiting for the RETURN key? How can I stop characters from being echoed on the screen as they're typed? (comp.lang.c FAQ)
You could also use ncurses: the filter function is useful for programs that process a command-line (rather than a full-screen application). There is a sample program in ncurses-examples (filter.c) which does this.
Referring to two questions:
Incorrect output from C++ Primer 1.4.4
Confused by control flow execution in C++ Primer example
My question is answered in both of those posts, but I want to delve further.
First, I know this is only the beginning, but let's say I make a fully functional program that runs in a designed window. By that level, will I already know how to implement a EOF? I can't expect someone running my program to know that they need to hit Control-Z.
Is there a way to implement a specific code that functions so that it does not need me to type in an unrecognized value?
Also one guy in those questions somewhat answered the importance of EOF, but how come the program doesn't even post the final cnt - 1?
Let's say I do the numbers 10 10 10 20 20 20. Without EOF, this will only show the "10 repeats 3 times." How come the program doesn't at least type in the count "10 repeats 3 times and 20 repeats 2 times" minus the final one with white space?
lets say I make a fully functional program that runs in a designed window. By that level, will I already know how to implement a eof? I can't expect someone running my program to know that they need to hit ctrl + z.
You could either tell the user explicitly to do a specific action to end input or the design of the window itself could tell the user the information implicitly. For instance, a dialog box could ask the user to enter input and click an OK button when done.
Is there a way to implement a specific code that functions so that it does not need me to type in an unrecognized value?
It seems like you would rather use a newline character to terminate your input. An example of this usage could be std::getline. Instead of writing
while (std::cin >> val)
you could instead use
std::string line;
if (std::getline(std::cin,line))
and assume that your user's input only consists of one line of values. There are plenty of other ways to similarly achieve this task depending on how you want to constrain the user's input.
Let's say I do the numbers 10 10 10 20 20 20. WIthout eof this will only show the "10 repeats 3 times." How come the program doesn't at least type in the count "10 repeats 3 times and 20 repeats 2 times" minus the final one with white space?
Without the eof your program is still executing the while (std::cin >> val) loop since std::cin >> val has not yet received invalid input.
Since the line
std::cout << currVal << " occurs " << cnt << " times" << std::endl;
occurs after that while loop finishes execution, you don't (yet) see any information about the three 20's in the input.
When you are reading a sequence of inputs you'll need some indication when your down. That could be a sentinel value ("enter 999 to stop reading"; you'd need to detect that while reading), an invalid input ("enter X to stop reading"; when reading an int the value X is illegal and causes the stream to got into failure mode, i.e., have std::ios_base::failbit set), or the more conventional "there isn't anything more to read". For a file, the last conditions is straight forward. When reading data from the console you'll either need to teach people how to terminate the input or you'll need to use a different approach.
If you want to intercept any keypressed and react on them directly you may do so, too. You could, e.g., use ncurses and control your input via that. You could also set the concole to non-buffering (on POSIX systems using tcgetattr() and tcsetattr() to clear the ICANON flag) and deal directly with all key presses to decide whether you want to continue reading or not.
Although I'm certainly up to doing fancy I/O stuff I normally don't bother: users will understand the "end of input" character and just deal with it. That is, my input normally looks something like this:
while (in >> whatever_needs_to_be_read) { ... }
... or, if the input is genuinely line oriented
for (std::string line; std::getline(in, line); ) { ... }
The function doing this input will then be called with a suitable std::istream which may be std::cin although I have typically some way to also read from a file (in addition to the shell-privided input redirection).
BTW, despite some indications in the questions referenced, "EOF" is not a character being read. It is a character entered, though (normally). ... and it is quite conventional to "know" the end of input character (on POSIX systems a ctrl-D and on Windows a ctrl-Z). You can use other indicators, e.g., the "interrupt" (ctrl-C) but that takes more work and doesn't integrate nicely with stream. To use the interrupt chacter you'd need to setup a signal handler for SIGINT and deal with that. One slightly annoying part of doing so is that if you get it wrong you'll need to find a different way to kill the program (e.g. on POSIX using ctrl-Z to put the process to sleep and kill it via a harsher signal).
I am currently stuck in this problem that I do not have any idea to fix. It is regarding a previous question that I have asked here before. But I will reiterate again as I found out the problem but have no idea to fix it.
My program accesses a text file that is updated constantly every millisecond 24/7. It grabs the data line by line and does comparison on each of the line. If any thing is "amiss"(defined by me), then I log that data into a .csv file. This program can be run at timed intervals(user defined).
My problem is that this program works perfectly fine on my computer but yet it doesnt on my clients computer. I have debug the program and these are my findings. Below is my code that I have reduced as much possible to ease the explanation process
int result;
char ReadLogLine[100000] = "";
FILE *readLOG_fp;
CString LogPathName;
LogPathName = Source_Folder + "\\serco.log"; //Source_Folder is found in a .ini file. Value is C:\\phython25\\xyratex\\serco_logs
readLOG_fp = fopen(LogPathName, "r+t");
while ((result = fscanf(readLOG_fp, "%[^\n]\n", ReadLogLine)) != EOF) // Loops through the file till it reaches the end of file
{
Sort_Array(); // Here is a function to sort the different lines that I grabbed from the text file
Comp_State(); // I compare the lines here and store them into an array to be printed out
}
fclose(readLOG_fp);
GenerateCSV(); // This is my function to generate the csv and print everything out
In Sort_Array(), I sort the lines that I grab from the text file as they could be of different nature. For example,
CStringArray LineType_A, LineType_B, LineTypeC, LineTypeD;
if (ReadLogLine == "Example line a")
{
LineType_A.add(ReadLogLine);
}
else if (ReadLogLine == "Example line b")
{
LineType_B.add(ReadLogLine);
}
and so on.
In CompState(), I compare the different values within each LineType array to see if there are any difference. If it is different, then I store them into a seperate array to print. A simple example would be.
CStringArray PrintCSV_Array;
for (int i = 0; i <= LineType_A.GetUpperBound(); i++)
{
if (LineType_A.GetAt(0) == LineType_A.GetAt(1))
{
LineType_A.RemoveAt(0);
}
else
{
LineType_A.RemoveAt(0);
PrintCSV_Array.Add(LineType_A.GetAt(0);
}
}
This way I dont have an infinite amount of data in the array.
Now to the GenerateCSV function, it is just a normal function where I create a .csv file and print whatever I have in the PrintCSV_Array.
Now to the problem. In my client's computer, it seems to not print anything out to the CSV. I debugged the program and found out that it keeps failing here.
while ((result = fscanf(readLOG_fp, "%[^\n]\n", ReadLogLine)) != EOF) // Loops through the file till it reaches the end of file
{
Sort_Array(); // Here is a function to sort the different lines that I grabbed from the text file
Comp_State(); // I compare the lines here and store them into an array to be printed out
}
fclose(readLOG_fp);
It goes into the while loop fine as I did some error checking there in the actual program. The moment it goes into the while loop it breaks out of it suggesting to me it reach EOF for some reason. When that happens, the program has no chance to go into both the Sort_Array and Comp_State functions thus giving me a blank PrintCSV_Array and nothing to print out.
Things that I have checked is that
I definitely have access to the text file.
My thoughts were because the text file is updated every
millisecond, it may have been opened by the other program to write
into it and thus not giving me access OR the text file is always in
an fopen state therefore not saving any data in for me to read. I
tested this out and the program has value added in as I see the KB's
adding up in front of my eyes.
I tried to copy the text file and paste it somewhere else for my
program to read, this way I definitely have full access to it and
once I am done with it, Ill delete it. This gave me nothing to print
aswell.
Am I right to deduce that it is always giving me EOF thus this is
having problems.
while ((result = fscanf(readLOG_fp, "%[^\n]\n", ReadLogLine)) != EOF) // Loops through the file till it reaches the end of file
If yes, How do I fix this?? What other ways can I make it read every line. I have seriously exhausted all my ideas on this problem and need some help in this.
Thanks everyone for your help.
Error is very obvious ... you might have over looked it..
You forgot to open the file.
FILE *readLOG_fp;
CString LogPathName;
LogPathName = Source_Folder + "\\serco.log";
readLOG_fp = fopen(LogPathName.GetBuffer());
if(readLOG_fp==NULL)
cout<<"Error: opening file\n";
Yeah. So, I'm trying to make a code for a guessing game. In this game, there's a hard mode. In hard mode, you have 15 guesses, and have to guess between 1 and 500. But my problem is this:
I'm trying to have hard mode save & display your wins/losses, but when it outputs the contents of wins.txt it outputs something like this:
Wins: 0x7fffee26df78
Losses: 0x7fffee26e178
It's really confusing me. Here's the part of the code I have for that:
ifstream losses_var("losses.txt");
ifstream wins_var("wins.txt");
losses_var>> loss;
wins_var>> win;
wins_var.close();
losses_var.close();
Then it gets called with:
cout<<"Wins: "<< wins <<"\nLosses: "<< losses <<"\n"
If you would like to see the full source code, it's here: http://pastebin.com/gPT37uBJ
My second problem:
Hard mode won't display when you win. That's pretty much the whole problem. In my code, the loop for asking users for input uses
while (guess != randNum)
So at the end bracket I have what I want the code to display when a user wins, but it just doesn't run. It just stops. I would like it if someone could help me with this. The line that has the bug is line 97 through 105. Again, source code is here: http://pastebin.com/gPT37uBJ
You've got your variable names confused
cout<<"Wins: "<< wins <<"\nLosses: "<< losses <<"\n";
should be
cout<<"Wins: "<< win <<"\nLosses: "<< loss <<"\n";
It's important to pick good variable names. One reason is so that you don't confuse yourself about what your variables mean (if you confuse yourself think how it's going to be for someone else looking at your code).
Others have already answered the output problem (win vs. wins). The other problem is probably in your logic of while loop nesting. The outer loop (while (guess != randNum)) starts, but its body contains the entire inner loop (while (guesses_left != 0)). This means that the outer condition is not checked again until the inner loop terminates, which means you've run out of guesses. Also note that if you guess correctly, inner loop will never terminate. You probably want something like this:
while (guesses_left > 0) {
// input user's guess
if (guess < randNum) {
// process it
} else if (guess > randNum) {
// process it
} else {
// it's equal, user won
// do what's necessary for a win
return 0;
}
}
// ran out of guesses
// do what's necessary for a loss
return 0;
You are not writing your variables win and loss to cout. From your pasted code, I can see that wins and losses are ofstream objects, which means you are probably seeing addresses there. I would advise you to choose more informative variable names to avoid hard to spot mistakes like this.