Question

I wanted to test my C++ skills by hammering out a quick fizzbuzz application. The code for it is posted below. However, when I run this application, something crazy occurs. Here’s my code:

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

bool ismultiple3(int i) {
  int res = i%3;
  if (res == 0)
    return true;
  return false;
}

bool ismultiple5(int i) {
  int res = i%5;
  if (res == 0)
    return true;
  return false;
}

int main() {
  string output;
  for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++) {
    output = i;
    if (ismultiple5(i) || ismultiple3(i)) {
      output = "";
      if (ismultiple3(i)) output.append("Fizz");
      if (ismultiple5(i)) output.append("Buzz");
    }
    cout << output;
  }
}

So when I run and compile it, my whole terminal gets messed up. It seems like the character encoding is somehow being altered. It still accepts commands normally, it just looks off. I ran an ls to demonstrate this.

Edit: In case anyone runs across this, I ended up adding an else statement and doing cout << i in it, because my computer’s g++ compiler lacked C++11 support. The functions were also shortened and combined into a single function that accepts 2 arguments, i and n.

Answer 1

As other commenters have said, output = i is the issue here. The value of i casts from an int to a char, leaving the output string with a sequence ASCII characters when you run that loop. For example, 97 == 'a', 144 == 'É', and so on.

I would consider rewriting the logic in the main function to simply have three cout << ... calls inside an if-else block. Additionally, the ismultipleN() functions can be replaced with simply (i % 3 == 0) for brevity.