Question

I’m trying to create a basic chess board in C++ and output it.

I set up a multidimensional board array of characters as an initial test, and put characters in to represent each piece. This output odd results, so I stripped down the code to the following, which is intended to create a board with two rows of pawns and a rook in each corner, labelled a, b, c and d.

#include <string>
using namespace std;

class Game
{
    public:

    int turn;
    char player;
    char board[7][7];

    Game()
    {
        turn = 1;
        player = 'w';

        int x,y;
        for(y=0;y<=7;y++) for(x=0;x<=7;x++) board[x][y] = '.';
        board[0][0] = 'a';
        board[7][0] = 'b';
        board[0][7] = 'c';
        board[7][7] = 'd';
        for(x=0;x<=7;x++) board[x][1] = 'p';
        for(x=0;x<=7;x++) board[x][6] = 'p';

    }

    string getBoard()
    {
        string result = "";
        int x,y;
        for(y=0;y<=7;y++)
        {
            for(x=0;x<=7;x++) result += board[x][y];
            result += "\n";
        }
        return result;
    }
};

I’m using the following to test:

Game game;
cout << game.getBoard();

and am getting the following result:

ac.....b
pppppppp
........
........
........
........
pppppppp
c.....bd

Any ideas why the rooks are duplicated and not just appearing in the corners? I can not seem to track down the issue.

Answer 1

Since a chess board has 8×8 size change your board declaration to:

char board[8][8];

Your current array is of size 7×7,

char board[7][7];

Since C++ arrays are 0-based 7 is not a valid index for both the dimensions. So you can’t do:

for(x=0;x<=7;x++) board[x][1] = ...

or

board[0][7] = 'c';