Validation problem

[Sion]

Hi, I am new to c++ and having trouble with the code snippet below, in as much as it does what i think it should be doing but the last line is supposed to output toupper characters however if a numeric value is entered first it will only show the numeric values instead of the char can anyone point me in the right direction so the code will validate alpha characters only and then capitalise at the end? thanks in advance.

#include<iostream>
#include<fstream>
#include<cstdio>
#include<string>
#include<ctime>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
 
 
    // validation of input
    bool isValid=true;
    int i=0;
    char chrId[3];
        string id="";
    cout<<"\n Enter your initials ";
    getline(cin,id);
    if(id.length()!=2)
    {
        cout<<"\n Please only enter two alpha initials "<<endl;
    getline(cin,id);
    }
    strcpy(chrId,(id.substr(0,2).c_str()));
    while(isValid && i < 2)
    {
        if(isalpha(chrId[i])==false)
        {
            cout<<"\n Please only enter two alpha initials "<<endl;
            isValid=false;
            getline(cin,id);;
        }
            chrId[i]=toupper(chrId[i]);
        i++;
 
    }
    cout<<"\n Initials entered are "<<chrId<<endl;
 
 
    system("PAUSE");
        return 0;
 
}
 

[weaknessforcats]

A couple of things:

1) you are using C++ so why are you using arrays? Use a string or vector.

2) your code is doing more than one thing at a time. You should a) receive data, b) validate data, c)if valid, use the data.

if(isalpha(chrId[i])==false) 
        { 
            cout<<"\n Please only enter two alpha initials "<<endl; 
            isValid=false; 
            getline(cin,id);; 
        } 
            chrId[i]=toupper(chrId[i]); 

In this snippet if the data is not valid you gat new data but then you drop out of the if statement and use the array but not the data you just received.

Try something like:

string data;
bool rval;
 
     GetData(data);
     rval = Validate(data)
     if (rval)
     {
        ProcessData(data);
     }
     else
     {
           //error message...
     }

Also, toupper only changes lower case alpha characters to uppercase characters. Any othe characters pass through unaltered. Hence a 3 going in is a 3 coming out.

[Sion]

Thanks for the suggestions i will keep at it :)