Question

I want to have a menu display that accepts user input. However, I want the user to be able to go back to the beginning of the menu to reselect options.

while(end != 1) {
    display menu options
    prompt user for input
        if(input == x) {
            do this
        }
        else
            do that
}

then, i want it to skip back up to the beginning of the loop and ask the question over again. Howcan I do this without creating an infinite loop of the menu printing across the screen?

Answer 1

Unfortunately you didn’t really show the code you are using but rather some pseudo code. Thus, it is hard to tell what you are actually trying to do. From the description of your problem and your pseudo code I suspect, however, that the root of the problem is that you don’t check your inputs and don’t restore the stream to a reasonably good state! To read the menu selection you probably want to use code akin to this:

int choice(0);
if (std::cin >> choice) {
    deal with the choice of the menu here
}
else if (std::cin.eof()) {
    // we failed because there is no further input: bail out!
    return;
}
else {
    std::string line;
    std::cin.clear();
    if (std::getline(std::cin, line)) {
         std::cout << "the line '" << line << "' couldn't be procssed (ignored)\n";
    }
    else {
        throw std::runtime_error("this place should never be reached! giving up");
    }
}

This is just a rough layout of how the input would basically look like. It would probably be encapsulated into a function (in which case you’d want to bail out of from a closed input somewhat differently, possibly using an exception or a special return value). The main part of his is to

1. restore the stream back to good state using std::isteam::clear()
2. skip over the bad input, in this case using std::getline() with a std::string; you could also just std::istream::ignore() the remainder of the line

There may be other problems with your menu but without seeing concrete code I’d think it is hard to tell what the concrete problems are.