Question

I mam trying to complete a college assignment in C++ and am having trouble with what should be a very basic operation. I am trying to read a string of characters from the keyboard. This is the relevant code:

  string t;
  cout << endl << "Enter title to search for: ";
  getline(cin, t, '\n');  

I understand, that the last line is supposed to read the input buffer (cin , in this instance) and store the character in the ‘t’ string until it reaches a new line character and then continue the program flow.

However, when I run my code in XCode, it just sort of jumps over the getline function and treats ‘t’ as an empty string.

What’s going on? I tried using cin >> t but that just read characters forever – Why cant I get this to behave?

Answer 1

The reason that the input operation apparently is skipped, is most probably (that means, ignoring possible peculiarities of a bugsy XCode IDE) that you have performed some input earlier and left a newline in the input buffer.

To fix that, make sure that you have emptied the input buffer after each input operation that logically should consume a line of input.

One easy way is to always use getline into a string, and then use e.g. an istringstream if you want to convert a number specification to number type.

Cheers & hth.,