Question

Compiling this on Codepad:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

void main (void)
{
    char ch[2];
    int value;
    cout<<"Enter two integers between 0-9"<<endl;
    cin.getline(ch,2);

    //testing with char array
    //(...)
    //how could I do operations like '*', '+', '-', or '/' to the char arrays
}

Gives:

Line 4: error: ‘::main’ must return ‘int’
compilation terminated due to -Wfatal-errors.

For example:

Lets say ch[0]='5' and ch[1]='3'

what do I need to do so I can do ch[0] – ch[1] = 2 and store into an int value

Answer 1

There are a few different problems with the code you’ve posted. main needs to have a return type of int.

int main() { /* .. */ }

Your call to cin.getline will only fill a single character in the array you’ve declared, because the function call will null terminate the array. You need

char array[3];

cin.getline( array, 3 );

After that, if array[0] contains ‘5’ and array[1] contains ‘3’, you can simply do

array[0] - array[1] 

to get the integer result 2.

If you need to deal with numbers outside the range [0..9] you’ll need to convert them to their numeric representation. This can be done using std::stringtream or atoi.