Question

I am writing a text-based Scrabble implementation for a college project.

The specification states that the user’s position input must be read from single line, like this:

Coordinates of the word's first letter and orientation (<A – P> <1 – 15> <H ou V>): G 5 H 

G 5 H is the user’s input for that particular example. The order, as shown, must be char int char.

What is the best way to read the user’s input?

cin >> row >> column >> orientation will cause crashes if the user screws up.

A getline and a subsequent string parser are a valid solution, but represent a bit of work.

Is there another, better, way to do this, that I am missing?

Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

getline and parsing doesn’t necessarily have to add much work. Since you already know how to read (correct) data from a stream, just read a line with getline, then create an istringstream from the line and read from there.

The one thing I’d add would be that it might very well make sense to create a class to hold the data for a particular move, and overload operator>> for that class to read data for a move. A rough sketch would be something like this:

class move { 
    char row;
    int column;
    char orientation;
public:
    friend std::istream &operator>>(std::istream &is, move &m);
};

std::istream &operator>>(std::istream &is, move &m) { 
    std::string temp;
    std::getline(is, temp);
    std::istringstream buffer(temp);

    // Now we can parse data from buffer just like we could from another stream.
    return is;
}

At least for the moment, I haven’t included any error handling code. Depending on how picky you want to be, this can get a little tricky (e.g., if input from the stringstream fails, setting the fail bit in the original input stream).