cin.getline sets the begin of a string a '\0' - c++

I run this piece of code on Visual C++ 2010
char c[10];
cin.get(&c[0],5);
cin.get(&c[2],4);
cout << c << endl;
and if I feed "123456789" to cin, the cout clause will print "12567", which is the result I expected.
But if I write:
char c[10];
cin.getline(&c[0],5);
cin.getline(&c[2],4);
cout<< c <<endl;
and feed the same string, it will only show me "12", where c=={'1','2','\0','4','\0'}
According to the documentation, the difference between cin.get and cin.getline is that cin.get does not discard the delim character as cin.getline does, so I don't know why this happens. Can anyone give me hints?

What is happening is that if basic_iostream::getline() reaches the limit of characters to be read (the streamsize argument minus 1), it stops reading then places a null character after the data it has read so far. It also sets the failbit on the stream.
So assuming that the stream has "123456789" ready to read, when you call cin.get(&c[0],5) the array will get {'1','2','3','4','\0'} placed into elements 0 through 4. And the failbit is set on the stream.
Now when you call cin.get(&c[2],4), the failbit is set on the stream, so nothing is read. The getline() call does nothing but place the terminating null into the array at index 2 (even if nothing is read from the stream, getline() will place the null character - even if the non--read is because of the failbit). So the array now looks like:
{'1','2','\0','4','\0'}
The documentation you link to mentions this:
If the function stops reading because this size is reached, the failbit internal flag is set.
But getline() does a lot, so it's easy to miss that detail.

Related

What exactly empty input means for cin.get()?

I think it's a simple question, but I don't understand the concept in this sample of code, mainly in the while loop:
#include <iostream>
const int ArSize = 10;
void strcount(const char * str);
int main(){
using namespace std;
char input[ArSize];
char next;
cout << "Enter text:\n";
cin.get(input, ArSize);
while(cin){
cin.get(next);
while(next != '\n')
cin.get(next)
strcount(input);
cout << "Enter next line, empty line ends the program:\n";
cin.get(input, ArSize);
}
cout << "The end\n";
return 0;
}
...
What I understand is that the while loop continues until cin returns false. It filters out the remaining input that's left in the buffer (because it wasn't the size of ArSize or under, or it was - then it will just filter out the newline character) until it meets the newline character. Then it counts string's characters (not important in this question), and then, let's say someone just presses enter. cin.get() discards newline character in input. So if someone for example enters an empty line of text in the terminal, it reads it as 'failed' input and cin returns false? Because if someone proceeds to the new line, just by pressing enter, it just leaves the newline character in the buffer, and cin.get() can't get it so it returns false. Or am I wrong?
In short - What exactly happens if you just press enter? cin.get() can't get the input because there's only newline in buffer and it counts it as failed input, so it returns false?
If cin.get(input, ArSize); reads no characters (i.e. the first character it encounters is a newline) it calls setstate(failbit) putting the stream into a failed state and therefore while(cin) becomes false, ending the loop.
As you can see here from the CPP reference https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/io/basic_istream/get
cin. get() is used to read the next character from the keyboard buffer and it returns that character in case it was available to be read and returns EOF otherwise and sets failbit and eofbit (which makes the expression in the if statement evaluates to false).
now let's see the code in action line by line:
while(cin){
this evaluates to true as long as the failbit flag in the cin object is set to goodbit showing no error. (https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/io/ios_base/iostate)
cin.get(next);
while(next != '\n')
cin.get(next)
the first line reads the next character from the keyboard buffer and stores it in the next variable and the while loop checks for the newline character which is equivalent to pressing Enter if it is not the next character in the buffer then continue reading and storing in next until it meets a newline character then it exits the loop returning to the outer while loop.
strcount(input);
cout << "Enter next line, empty line ends the program:\n";
cin.get(input, ArSize);
then strcount function as I assume is used to count the characters entered by the user in the input array by this line of code before the while loop.
cin.get(input, ArSize);
and then at the last line inside of the while loop, the program reads another input by the user.
Please Note:
the use of these three lines here is to make sure that each line is read at every single loop with no characters read in the second input before the newline character appears even if the number of characters is bigger than the ArSize variable. when that happens the first line before the while loop will read the number of ArSize from the buffer and if there are remaining characters other than the newline it will be read by the three lines until a newline appears so that the next get function will start looking for characters in the buffer after the previous newline.
cin.get(next);
while(next != '\n')
cin.get(next)
if there is anything unclear please let me know.

Why istringstream appends '-1' character at the end of stream?

I've noticed that when I'm using istringstream eof() doesn't return true even if the whole string is "consumed". For example:
char ch;
istringstream ss{ "0" };
ss >> ch;
cout << ss.peek() << " " << (ss.eof() ? "true" : "false");
Outputs(VS2015):
-1 false
eof() isn't supposed to return true when all the data is consumed. It's supposed to return true when you attempt to read more data than is available.
In this example, you never do that.
In particular, peek is a "request", that won't set EOF even when there's nothing left to read; because you're, well, peeking. However, it will return the value of the macro EOF (commonly -1), which is what you're seeing when you output peek()'s result. Nothing is "appended" to the stream.
Read the documentation for functions that you use.
std::istream::peek
Peek next character Returns the next character in the input sequence,
without extracting it: The character is left as the next character to
be extracted from the stream.
If any internal state flags is already set before the call or is set
during the call, the function returns the end-of-file value (EOF).
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/istream/istream/peek/

EOF - scanf and printf

I'm tring to do a simple exercise here, but i need to understand how EOF works first.
void main()
{
char s1[1000];
while (scanf("%s", s1)!=EOF)
;
printf("%s",s1);
}
The idea is to have multiple lines in input, and display them.
The problem I have is that if I put
Hello World
This is stackoverflow
When printf is called, it only prints
stackoverflow
Why isn't it printing everything and how do I make it print?
Regards
Remove the semicolon ;:
while (scanf("%s", s1)!=EOF)
printf("%s",s1);
Note that this will still exhibit odd behavior at end of file depending on how it ends exactly. Furthermore, it splits the input into words, which are separated by spaces or new lines. You may want to simply split into lines.
So you may be better served with for instance:
while (gets(s1)!=NULL)
puts(s1);
This code fragments reads your input line by line until end-of-file.
To read everything (or as much as your buffer can hold), you can use:
char s1[1000] = "";
fread(s1, sizeof(s1) - 1, 1, stdin);
puts(s1);
However, my preferred method of reading a text file is:
using namespace std;
string line;
while (getline(cin, line))
{
cout << line << endl;
}
That is because usually I want to process a file line by line, and getline with a string ensures the line buffer is always big enough.
You probably want this:
char s1[1000][20];
int i = 0 ;
while (!feof(stdin))
fgets(s1[i++], 20, stdin) ;
int j ;
for (j = 0; j < i; j++)
printf("%s\n", s1[j]);
Here you can enter at most 1000 lines that are maximum 19 characters long.
What you have is a loop that reads words into a buffer until it reaches EOF (and does nothing with those words), followed by a printf to print the contents of the buffer. The printf is after the loop (not in it), so executes once after the loop completes. At that time, the buffer will contain the last word read, so that is what gets printed.
The EOF return test means "nothing more to be read", which isn't necessarily an end of file (might be an error condition of some kind), but in practice that distinction can be ignored. Looping until your reading function returns EOF or NULL (depends on function) is good practice.
If you want to print each word as it is read, you need to put a printf in the loop.
If you want to store the words for later processing, you need to store them somewhere. That means declaring some storage space, or allocating space on the heap, and some bookkeeping to track how much space you've used/allocated.
If you want lines rather than words, you should use fgets instead of scanf("%s". Note that fgets returns NULL rather than EOF when there's nothing more to be read.
Because it only prints the last thing that is read from the file ("stackoverflow"). This is caused by the semicolon after the end of your while(...); - this means that you are doing while(...) { /* do nothing */} - which is probably not what you wanted
Also, printf("%s",s1)!='\0'; makes no sense at all. For one thing, printf returns the number of characters printed - '\0' is the value zero written as a character constant. And of course, doing != 0 of the result without some sort of use of the comparison is pretty much pointless too.
Use fgets instead of scanf if you want to read one line at at time. scanf will stop reading when it finds a whitespace. fgets will read till the end of the line.
Use fgets(). Simple and sweet
char buf[1000];
while (fgets(buf, sizeof buf, stdin) != NULL) {
fputs(buf, stdout);
}
Here is how end-of-file works in C. The input channels are called input streams; disk files and stdin are both input streams. The "end-of-file" state is a flag that a stream has, and that flag is triggered when you try to read from a stream, but it turns out there are no more characters in the stream, and there never will be any more. (If the stream is still active but just waiting for user input for example, it is not considered to be end-of-file; read operations will block).
Streams can have other error states, so looping until "end-of-file" is set is usually wrong. If the stream does go into an error state then your loop will never exit (aka. "infinite loop").
The end-of-file state can be checked by feof. However, some input operations also can signal an error as well as, or instead of, returning the actual data they were intended to read. These functions can return the value EOF. Usually these functions return EOF in both cases: end-of-file, and stream error. This is different to feof which only returns true in the case of end-of-file.
For example, getchar() and scanf will return EOF if it was end-of-file, but also if the stream is in an error state.
So it is OK to use getchar()'s result as a loop condition, but not feof on its own.
Also, it is sometimes not OK to use scanf() != EOF as a loop condition. It's possible that there is no stream error, but just that the data you requested wasn't there. For example, if you scan for "%d" but there are letters in the stream. Instead, it's better to check for successful conversion (scanf returns the number of successful conversions it performed). Then when you exit your loop, you can go on to call feof and ferror to see whether it was due to end-of-file, or error, or just unexpected input.

cin.getline(char, int) gets skipped when in a loop

This is the code I have been trying to execute on TurboC++ 3.0 (Yes, I know it's ancient but can't help it), when the program goes into the loop, it skips the value of y every time including the first attempt. Any help would be appreciated but please avoid rubbing salt into wounds by asking why TurboC++ 3.0. Thanks in advance.
void main()
{
int x, z;
char y[10];
for (int i=0;i<5;i++)
{
cout<<"\nX:";
cin >> x;
cout<<"\nY:";
cin.getline(y,10);
cout<<"\nZ:";
cin>>z;
}
for(i=0;i<5;i++)
{
cout<<x<<"\n";
cout.write(y, 10)<<"\n";
cout<<z<<"\n\n";
}
}
and even if I use cin.get(var) where var is a character, i still get weird results like a heart, diamond or even a smiley.
You get weird results because you are not terminating your c style string with a null character.('\0').
The problem you are facing is because , fail bit or eof bit is set. To remove that, do the following:-
You can use
cin.clear() ;
to clear if any error bits are set and then use
cin.ignore(100, '\n') ;
// 100 is just a random no, change it depending on your size of input.
to ignore any irrelevant characters int the stream.
or you can do the following:-
after cin>>x just type cin.ignore(), it will flush out any newline characters present in the buffer .
it skips the value of y
cin >> x reads the input until it finds something that's not a digit - in this case, the end-of-line character. That character is left in the stream.
getline reads the input until it finds an end-of-line character (or the end of the stream). Since you've left one in the stream, it finds it straight away and doesn't read anything.
You can call cin.ignore(-1,'\n') to ignore the remainder of the first line after reading x (assuming your prehistoric library behaves like the modern one).
i still get weird results like a heart, diamond or even a smiley
cout.write(y, 10) is wrong - there are up to 9 valid characters in y, followed by the null terminator. You want cout << y to treat it as a null-terminated string and print only the valid characters.

getline() does not work if used after some inputs [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Need help with getline()
getline() is not working, if I use it after some inputs, i.e.
#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
main()
{
string date,time;
char journal[23];
cout<<"Date:\t";
cin>>date;
cout<<"Time:\t";
cin>>time;
cout<<"Journal Entry:\t";
cin.getline(journal,23);
cout<<endl;
system("pause");
}
where as if I use getline() on top of inputs, it does work i.e.
cout<<"Journal Entry:\t";
cin.getline(journal,23);
cout<<"Date:\t";
cin>>date;
cout<<"Time:\t";
cin>>time;
What might be the reason?
Characters are extracted until either (n - 1) characters have been
extracted or the delimiting character is found (which is delimiter if this
parameter is specified, or '\n' otherwise). The extraction also stops
if the end of the file is reached in the input sequence or if an error
occurs during the input operation.
When cin.getline() reads from the input, there is a newline character left in the input stream, so it doesn't read your c-string. Use cin.ignore() before calling getline().
cout<<"Journal Entry:\t";
cin.ignore();
cin.getline(journal,23);
Adding to what #DavidHammen said:
The extraction operations leave the trailing '\n' character in the stream. On the other hand, istream::getline() discards it. So when you call getline after an extraction operator, '\n' is the first character it encounters and it stops reading right there.
Put this after before getline call extraction:
cin.ignore()
A more robust way of taking input would be something like this:
while (true) {
cout<<"Time:\t";
if (cin>>time) {
cin.ignore(); // discard the trailing '\n'
break;
} else {
// ignore everything or to the first '\n', whichever comes first
cin.ignore(numeric_limits<streamsize>::max(), '\n');
cin.clear(); // clear the error flags
cout << "Invalid input, try again.\n";
}
}
You're not checking stream status. The std::cin stream extraction operator (operator>>) can fail. When it does, the stream is marked as "bad" (failbit, badbit, or eofbit are set). Once "bad", all subsequent stream extractions on that stream will fail unless you clear the status.
Learn to be a paranoid programmer. Always check status of those formatted input operations. You could, for example throw an exception, or print an error message and exit. The one thing you shouldn't do is to simply assume that it worked.