much text, one cout<< ?

[John Brawley]

Is this going to cause me a portability problem?
Purpose: make it easy for me to write my 'help' text block in the .cpp file,
just as I wish it to be output 'formatted-ly' to the user upon demand while
the program is running.

#include <iostream>;
using namespace std;

int main() {
cout<<"these \
lines\n\
are \
much \
longer\n\
than \
this.\n";

return 0;
}

(Or, any better suggestion, without more code?)
Thanks
--
Peace
JB
jb@tetrahedrave rse.com
Web: http://tetrahedraverse.com

[Victor Bazarov]

John Brawley wrote:

Is this going to cause me a portability problem?

It's not valid C++, so, yes, you bet.

Purpose: make it easy for me to write my 'help' text block in the
.cpp file, just as I wish it to be output 'formatted-ly' to the user
upon demand while the program is running.

#include <iostream>;
using namespace std;

int main() {
cout<<"these \
lines\n\
are \
much \
longer\n\
than \
this.\n";

return 0;
}

(Or, any better suggestion, without more code?)
Thanks

Surround every line of text with double quotes.

V
--
Please remove capital 'A's when replying by e-mail
I do not respond to top-posted replies, please don't ask

[=?UTF-8?B?RXJpayBXaWtzdHLDtm0=?=]

On 2008-02-09 19:15, John Brawley wrote:

Is this going to cause me a portability problem?
Purpose: make it easy for me to write my 'help' text block in the .cpp file,
just as I wish it to be output 'formatted-ly' to the user upon demand while
the program is running.

#include <iostream>;
using namespace std;

int main() {
cout<<"these \
lines\n\
are \
much \
longer\n\
than \
this.\n";

return 0;
}

(Or, any better suggestion, without more code?)

If you have a number of string literals after each other they will be
concatenated when compiling, just write each line enclosed by double quotes:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
std::cout <<
"Here begins a number "
"of long lines";
}
Do not forget adding newlines (\n) wherever you need one.

--
Erik Wikström

[James Kanze]

On Feb 9, 8:32 pm, "Victor Bazarov" <v.Abaza...@com Acast.netwrote:

John Brawley wrote:

Is this going to cause me a portability problem?

It's not valid C++, so, yes, you bet.

What's wrong with it? It's not good C++, but it looks legal to
me.

Purpose: make it easy for me to write my 'help' text block
in the .cpp file, just as I wish it to be output
'formatted-ly' to the user upon demand while the program is
running.

#include <iostream>;
using namespace std;

int main() {
cout<<"these \
lines\n\
are \
much \
longer\n\
than \
this.\n";

return 0;
}

(Or, any better suggestion, without more code?)

Surround every line of text with double quotes.

Which will make the code more readable (since the following
lines can be correctly indented), but won't change anything in
the meaning of the code.

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:ja******* **@gmail.com
Conseils en informatique orientée objet/
Beratung in objektorientier ter Datenverarbeitu ng
9 place Sémard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'École, France, [phone]

[James Kanze]

On Feb 9, 7:15 pm, "John Brawley" <jgbraw...@char ter.netwrote:

Is this going to cause me a portability problem?
Purpose: make it easy for me to write my 'help' text block in the .cpp file,
just as I wish it to be output 'formatted-ly' to the user upon demand while
the program is running.

#include <iostream>;
using namespace std;

int main() {
cout<<"these \
lines\n\
are \
much \
longer\n\
than \
this.\n";

return 0;
}

(Or, any better suggestion, without more code?)

In general (or at least in theory), every program has a
potential portability problem. All implementations have
ressource limits, and if you exceed them, you're going to get
into trouble. As long as your string doesn't exceed the maximum
string length of the compiler, however, and there's enough room
for it in the memory in which the program runs, this should not
cause a problem.

To tell the truth, I have no idea what the maximum string length
for a compiler might be, but I have, on occasion, had strings
which represented tens of lines of output---several KB in
all---, without the slightest problem. (One would hope, of
course, that the maximum string length would only be limited by
the memory available to the compiler, but one never knows.)

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:ja******* **@gmail.com
Conseils en informatique orientée objet/
Beratung in objektorientier ter Datenverarbeitu ng
9 place Sémard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'École, France, [phone]

[John Brawley]

"John Brawley" <jg*******@char ter.netwrote in message
news:1b******** *****@newsfe06. lga...

Is this going to cause me a portability problem?
Purpose: make it easy for me to write my 'help' text block
in the .cpp file, just as I wish it to be output 'formatted-ly' to
the user upon demand while the program is running.

#include <iostream>;
using namespace std;

int main() {
cout<<"these \
lines\n\
are \
much \
longer\n\
than \
this.\n";

return 0;
}

Thanks Victor, James, Erik, Kai-Uwe;
I deduce:
Mine is legal (it works, no serious portability problem), but poor C++
practice. (Even though the console window of help text looks exactly like I
want it to.)
I'll think about it more but probably take your suggestions and use
doub-quotes around every line. It'll be 'uglier' to me in the .cpp file,
but
I'd just as soon do things "the right way" whenever possible.
Appreciated.
(It was unexpectedly interesting to see the first two kind helpers
disagreeing with each other... (*grin*) ...over what I feared was 'way too
simple (newbie-ignorant) a question for an actual disagreement from
experienced programmers to arise.)
Have a nice day!

--
Peace
JB
jb@tetrahedrave rse.com
Web: http://tetrahedraverse.com

[Martin York]

Oops sorry missed the \ at the end of the line.

[Ian Collins]

Martin York wrote:

Oops sorry missed the \ at the end of the line.

And the context!

--
Ian Collins.

[Martin York]

I'll think about it more but probably take your suggestions and use
doub-quotes around every line. It'll be 'uglier' to me in the .cpp file,
but
I'd just as soon do things "the right way" whenever possible.
Appreciated.

This is a perfect example of a place where you can separate data and
code.
You don't really want the text in the source. If you move the data out
of the code into a separate file you increase readability (as it is
not ugly) you increase portability (as you can then localize the
string without changing the code (a bit of extra work required but not
much)) you reduce your probability of running into compiler specific
limits.

Personally I would do somthing like this:

1) Put the text in a seprate file:

std::ifstream text(getLocalis edFileName());
std::copy(std:: istreambuf_iter ator<char>(text ),std::istreamb uf_iterator<cha r>(),std::ostre am_iterator<cha r>(std::cout)) ;

[James Kanze]

On Feb 10, 5:17 pm, "John Brawley" <jgbraw...@char ter.netwrote:

"John Brawley" <jgbraw...@char ter.netwrote in message

[...]

I'll think about it more but probably take your suggestions
and use doub-quotes around every line. It'll be 'uglier' to
me in the .cpp file, but I'd just as soon do things "the right
way" whenever possible.

I'm curious. Why uglier? Your solution doesn't allow
indentation of any but the first line---using separate string
literals (concatenated by the compiler) does.

Of course, if this is really a more or less large body of text
that you want to maintain as text, the best solution is to do
just that---maintain it as text, in a separate file. If you
still want to have it "compiled into" your program (there are
pros and contras to this), then a simple preprocessor will
convert it to a C style array. Something like:

#! /usr/bin/awk
BEGIN {
print "// Automatically generated file"
print "// DO NOT EDIT"
print ""
print "#include \"helpText.hh\" "
print ""
print "char const helpText[] ="
}
{
print " \"" $0 "\""
}
END {
print ";"
}

Then create (manually) the necessary "helpText.h h" header (which
is just one line), and the work is done.

(FWIW: I'd strongly recommend this. Maintaining text in a
format that has a C++ string literal per line will be a pain,
e.g. anytime one line gets to long, and you have to reformat the
paragraph. Whereas if the file is pure text, and the editor
recognizes it as such, it will do the reformatting for you.)

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:ja******* **@gmail.com
Conseils en informatique orientée objet/
Beratung in objektorientier ter Datenverarbeitu ng
9 place Sémard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'École, France, [phone]