Question

Hello everyone I am doing a programming assignment on structured data and I believe I understand how structs work.

I am trying to read in a list of student names, ID numbers (A-Numbers), and their balances.

When I compile my code though, it will read everything in the first time around, but the second time around the loop and every time after, it prompts for the username but skips the getline and goes straight to A-Number and A-number entry.

Any help would be appreciated. Just trying to figure out how to make the getline work every time the loop goes around.

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <iomanip>
using namespace std;


int main(){
    const int maxStudents = 30;
    struct Students{
        string studentName;
        int aNumber;
        double outstandingBalance;};

    Students students[maxStudents];

    for(int count = 0; count < maxStudents-1; count++)
    {
        cout<<"Student Name:";
                cin.ignore();
        getline(cin,students[count].studentName);
        cout<<"\nA-Number:";
        cin>>students[count].aNumber;
        if(students[count].aNumber == -999)
            break;
        cout<<"\nOutstanding Balance:";
        cin>>students[count].outstandingBalance;
    }

    cout<<setw(20)<<"A-Number"<<"Name"<<"Balance";

    for(int count2 = 29; count2 >= maxStudents-1; count2--)
        cout<<setw(20)<<students[count2].aNumber<<students[count2].studentName<<students[count2].outstandingBalance;


    system("pause");
    return 0;
}

Answer 1

The reason what you’re doing doesn’t work is that the ‘>>’ operators the
first time through don’t extract the trailing '\n', the next getline
sees it, and returns immediately with an empty line.

The simple answer is: don’t mix getline and >>. If the input is
line oriented, use getline. If you need to parse data in the line
using >>, use the string read by getline to initialize a
std::istringstream, and use >> on it.