Question

I’m attempting to learn C++ and one exercise is to build a command line tool that accepts user input and stores it in a char array until the user enters a blank line. I think I have the skeleton right but for whatever reason my while runs continuously. My code is as follows:

    char a[256];

    //while the first character isn't a new line
    while (a[0] != '\n') {

        //get the char array
        cin >> a; 

        cout << a;

    }

Any help would be most appreciated.

Answer 1

You can’t detect newlines with operator>>. For most types, it uses whitespace as a delimiter, and it doesn’t differentiate between spaces, tabs or newlines. Use getline instead:

for (std::string line; std::getline(std::cin, line); )
{
    if (line.empty())
    {
        // if the line is empty, that means the user didn't
        // press anything before hitting the enter key
    }
}