Question

I have a structured a data type called bookStruct and books is the name of the variable associated with the bookStruct data type. book[10] is the array that is 10 characters long and has 4 characters of data, meaning book[0] to book [3] have datas in them when the rest are empty (o values). Now I want to print the datas that are availabe already in the array and not print the ones that are empty otherwise 0. I tried the below code, with no luck.What am I doing wrong here?

for (int i=0;i<MAX_BOOKS && books[i]!='\0';i++)
            {
                cout << "Book Title: " << books[i].bookTitle << endl;
                cout << "Total Pages: " << books[i].bookPageN << endl;
                cout << "Book Review: " << books[i].bookReview << endl;
                cout << "Book Price: " << books[i].bookPrice<< "\n\n" << endl;
            }

here is the declaration for book struct

struct bookStruct
{
    string bookTitle;
    int bookPageN;
    int bookReview;
    float bookPrice;
};

bookStruct books[10];

Answer 1

It’s a little hard to tell what’s being asked here. You see, it’s quite easy to just keep count of how many books you have stored:

int numBooks = 0;

When you add a book, you increment numBooks up until MAX_BOOKS.

for( int i=0; i<numBooks; i++ ) ...

If you don’t want to do that, you certainly can’t test books[i] != '\0' because that is testing the struct against a single character.

Instead, you might want to test books[i].bookTitle.size() != 0

(or indeed !books[i].bookTitle.empty()).

for( int i=0; i<MAX_BOOKS && !books[i].bookTitle.empty(); i++ ) ...

Another alternative is to store books in a vector instead of an array, so you don’t have to worry about maximum counts and current counts. The vector can shrink and grow for you.

vector<bookStruct> books;

...

for( int i = 0; i < books.size(); i++ ) ...