help on char data type

[bitong]

my code:
char name;
float price, no_of_pieces;
cout<<"Enter your name: ";
cin>>name;
cout<<"Enter price: ";
cin>>price;
cout<<"Enter no of pieces: ";
cin>>no_of_pieces;

output:

Enter your name: John
Enter price:
Enter no of pieces:

Question:

Why is it that it bypass the enter price and enter no of pieces? when I enter JOHN and then press enter, it bypass the enter price and no of pieces. Meaning I was not ask to enter the price and no of pieces? why is it like that?

[gpraghuram]

my code:
char name;
float price, no_of_pieces;
cout<<"Enter your name: ";
cin>>name;
cout<<"Enter price: ";
cin>>price;
cout<<"Enter no of pieces: ";
cin>>no_of_pieces;

output:

Enter your name: John
Enter price:
Enter no of pieces:

Question:

Why is it that it bypass the enter price and enter no of pieces? when I enter JOHN and then press enter, it bypass the enter price and no of pieces. Meaning I was not ask to enter the price and no of pieces? why is it like that?

Use this call to flush the stdin.
fflush(stdin); //this is c variant.
Sometimes some characters may be left in the standard input which will be picked up by the cin.

Raghuram

[weaknessforcats]

What happens here is you enter JOHN. These characters are now in the input buffer.

Now you do

cin >> name;

name is a char so one character is extracted. name is now J and OHN are still in the input buffer.

Now you do

cin>> price;

where price is a float. cin>> sees the O and declares that O is not a floating point value so it sets a error flag and returns having done nothing. OHN are still in the input buffer.

Now you do:

cin>>no_of_pieces;

Here cin sees the error flag is set, so it does nothing since there has been an error. It returns having done nothing.

You have to remember that the >> operator means formatted input. That is, you know ahead of time what will be input. Any deviation, the error flag is set and all subsequent cin statements cease to work.

You can get around this problem ny declaring name an array:

char name[5];

Then you can cin >> name using JOHN.

The array is just large enough for JOHN and a null terminator a and the name must be one word. If it has spaces, like JOHN DOE, then cin >> won't work even if the array is made larger becuse it will stop on the space.

When you are first starting out, enter exactly what you expect. Leave input editing for another day.