Program not counting number of records [closed] - c++

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Closed 10 years ago.
I wrote a program that reads to one file, writes to another and prints to the screen. In other words, it is supposed to do three things (i.e. read, write and print).
The program is also supposed to count the number of records in a file named "Chap_11_employee_data.txt". It is just displaying the following, however.
**Total Records 0**
The End
When it writes to a file, it also displays weird numbers such as -858993460. I have tried almost everything, which led me to register an account here. My code is listed below as well as the file I am trying to read from and the file I am trying to write to.
Thank you very much for your guy's time.
Code:
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <iomanip>
using std::cin;
using std::cout;
using std::endl;
using std::setw;
using std::ios;
using std::ifstream;
using std::ofstream;
const int EMPLOYEES = 20;
const int MAX = 21;
int ReadData( ifstream &inFile, ofstream &outFile, char name[][MAX], int age[] );
void WriteOutputFile( ofstream &outFile, char name[ ][MAX], int age[ ], int counter );
void PrintTotalsAndSummary( ofstream &out, int totalRecords );
int main()
{
char name[EMPLOYEES][MAX];
int age[EMPLOYEES];
int record_counter(0);
ifstream inFile;
ofstream outFile( "Chap_11_Report.txt" );
inFile.open( "Chap_11_employee_data.txt" );
if ( inFile.is_open() )
{
record_counter = ReadData( inFile, outFile, name, age );
inFile.close();
if( outFile.is_open() )
{
WriteOutputFile( outFile, name, age, record_counter );
PrintTotalsAndSummary( outFile, record_counter );
outFile.close();
}
else
{
cout << "Trouble Opening File";
cout << "\n\n\t\t ** About to EXIT NOW! ** ";
}
}
else
{
cout << "Trouble Opening File";
cout << "\n\n\t\t ** About to EXIT NOW! ** ";
}
return 0;
}
int ReadData( ifstream & inFile, ofstream & outFile, char name[][MAX], int age[] )
{
int counter = 0;
inFile >> name[counter] >> age[counter]; // Priming Read
while ( !inFile.eof() )
{
cout << setiosflags( ios::left ) << setw( 25 )
<< name[counter] << resetiosflags( ios::left )
<< setw( 4 ) << age [counter] << endl;
counter++;
inFile >> name[counter] >> age[counter];
}
return counter;
}
void WriteOutputFile( ofstream &outFile, char name[][MAX], int age[], int counter)
{
outFile << " Here is the Output File" << endl;
for ( int r = 0; r <= counter; r++ )
{
outFile << setiosflags( ios::left ) << setw( 25 )
<< name[r] << setw( 4 )
<< resetiosflags( ios::left ) << age[r]
<< endl;
}
}
void PrintTotalsAndSummary( ofstream &outFile, int totalRecords )
{
// To screen
cout << "\n\n\t** Total Records: " << totalRecords << " **\n"
<< "\t\t The End \n";
// To file
outFile << "\n\n\t** Total Records: " << totalRecords << " **\n"
<< "\t\t The End \n";
}
File I am reading from (Chap_11_employee_data.txt):
"Alexis","Blough",1-1921,"CEO"
"Bill","Pay",1-7711,"Accounting"
"Willy","Makit",4-1595,"Sales"
"Marie","Murray",1-4986,"MIS"
"Cal","Caldwellowinski",5-0911,"MIS"
"Jamie","Johanasola",5-9999,"Marketing"
File I am writing to (Chap_11_Report.txt):
Here is the Output File
-858993460
** Total Records: 0 **
The End

Answer 1

Here is your input statement...
inFile >> name[counter] >> age[counter];
And the output file format is this...
"Alexis","Blough",1-1921,"CEO"
"Bill","Pay",1-7711,"Accounting"
The input statement reads the name till it encounters a space or an endline character. So in the first case it would read the whole line as there is no space in between the words. Next on, it would take input of age which is an int. It would start taking input of age from the second line, which is full of characters from the beginning. A character in integer stream is undefined behavior. That is the reason you are getting wrong results.
The problem is the mismatch of the file format with the input format. Try to synchronise them.
For reading white spaces as well, use inFile.get() or inFile.getline().

Answer 2

Your read has one problem:
while ( !inFile.eof() )
The problem is that the stream can go bad in a way that is not eof(). If this happens you will enter an infinite loop. So really you should check for bad().
while ( !inFile.bad() ) // check for eof and other error cases.
Normally this test is completely wrong. But you have managed to get around this by doing the following:
<Get Input>
while ( !inFile.bad() )
{
< DO WORK>
<Get Input>
}
The same affect can be achieved (in a more idiomatic way) with:
while ( <Get Input> )
{
< DO WORK>
}
The read (using >> or std::getline()) returns a reference to a stream. When this is used in a boolean context (like a while loop test) it is converted to bool (actually bool like for the language lawyers) that represents the state of the stream which is obtained by using bad. Thus the loop body is only entered if the read actually worked.
The input stream operators are very simplistic and any failure on input will set an internal failure bit inside the stream causing them to sieze up and not provide further input until the failure bit is reset.
Given the input you have provided this will fail:
inFile >> name[counter] >> age[counter];
The variable name[counter] represents a C-String and the the input operator >> when applied to a C-String will read until the first white space character (in this case newline). So here we assign:
"Alexis","Blough",1-1921,"CEO"
to this value.
We then try and continue reading using age[counter] an integer value. This tries to read an integer from:
"Bill","Pay",1-7711,"Accounting"
This will fail as the character '"' is not a digit.
What you should be doing is:
std::string name;
std::getline(inFile, name, ','); // Read upto the ',' character (and discard it)
// You may want to remove the quotes here.
int age = 0;
// Age is not defined in the input so set it manually.
std::string line;
std::getline(inFile, line); // Read and ignore the rest of the line.