Read input numbers separated by spaces

Question

This may be a total beginner\'s question, but I have yet to find an answer that works for me.

Currently, I\'m writing a program for a class that takes in a user\'s input

Answer 1

I would recommend reading in the line into a string, then splitting it based on the spaces. For this, you can use the getline(...) function. The trick is having a dynamic sized data structure to hold the strings once it's split. Probably the easiest to use would be a vector.

#include <string>
#include <vector>
...
  string rawInput;
  vector<String> numbers;
  while( getline( cin, rawInput, ' ' ) )
  {
    numbers.push_back(rawInput);
  }

So say the input looks like this:

Enter a number, or numbers separated by a space, between 1 and 1000.
10 5 20 1 200 7

You will now have a vector, numbers, that contains the elements: {"10","5","20","1","200","7"}.

Note that these are still strings, so not useful in arithmetic. To convert them to integers, we use a combination of the STL function, atoi(...), and because atoi requires a c-string instead of a c++ style string, we use the string class' c_str() member function.

while(!numbers.empty())
{
  string temp = numbers.pop_back();//removes the last element from the string
  num = atoi( temp.c_str() ); //re-used your 'num' variable from your code

  ...//do stuff
}

Now there's some problems with this code. Yes, it runs, but it is kind of clunky, and it puts the numbers out in reverse order. Lets re-write it so that it is a little more compact:

#include <string>
...
string rawInput;
cout << "Enter a number, or numbers separated by a space, between 1 and 1000." << endl;
while( getline( cin, rawInput, ' ') )
{
  num = atoi( rawInput.c_str() );
  ...//do your stuff
}

There's still lots of room for improvement with error handling (right now if you enter a non-number the program will crash), and there's infinitely more ways to actually handle the input to get it in a usable number form (the joys of programming!), but that should give you a comprehensive start. :)

Note: I had the reference pages as links, but I cannot post more than two since I have less than 15 posts :/

Edit: I was a little bit wrong about the atoi behavior; I confused it with Java's string->Integer conversions which throw a Not-A-Number exception when given a string that isn't a number, and then crashes the program if the exception isn't handled. atoi(), on the other hand, returns 0, which is not as helpful because what if 0 is the number they entered? Let's make use of the isdigit(...) function. An important thing to note here is that c++ style strings can be accessed like an array, meaning rawInput[0] is the first character in the string all the way up to rawInput[length - 1].

#include <string>
#include <ctype.h>
...
string rawInput;
cout << "Enter a number, or numbers separated by a space, between 1 and 1000." << endl;
while( getline( cin, rawInput, ' ') )
{
  bool isNum = true;
  for(int i = 0; i < rawInput.length() && isNum; ++i)
  {
    isNum = isdigit( rawInput[i]);
  }

  if(isNum)
  {
    num = atoi( rawInput.c_str() );
    ...//do your stuff
  }
  else
    cout << rawInput << " is not a number!" << endl;
}

The boolean (true/false or 1/0 respectively) is used as a flag for the for-loop, which steps through each character in the string and checks to see if it is a 0-9 digit. If any character in the string is not a digit, the loop will break during it's next execution when it gets to the condition "&& isNum" (assuming you've covered loops already). Then after the loop, isNum is used to determine whether to do your stuff, or to print the error message.

Answer 2

int main() {
int sum = 0;
cout << "enter number" << endl;
int i = 0;
while (true) {
    cin >> i;
    sum += i;
    //cout << i << endl;
    if (cin.peek() == '\n') {
        break;
    }
    
}

cout << "result: " << sum << endl;
return 0;
}

I think this code works, you may enter any int numbers and spaces, it will calculate the sum of input ints

Answer 3

By default, cin reads from the input discarding any spaces. So, all you have to do is to use a do while loop to read the input more than one time:

do {
   cout<<"Enter a number, or numbers separated by a space, between 1 and 1000."<<endl;
   cin >> num;

   // reset your variables

   // your function stuff (calculations)
}
while (true); // or some condition

Answer 4

You'll want to:

• Read in an entire line from the console
• Tokenize the line, splitting along spaces.
• Place those split pieces into an array or list
• Step through that array/list, performing your prime/perfect/etc tests.

What has your class covered along these lines so far?