Question

My understanding is that the operator >> returns the left operand, so cin >> x returns cin which has a value of false if we encounter an EOF or other errors. Now my guess is that since cin skips whitespace, characters like \n don’t get stored. What I’d like to do is something like this:

int x;

while((cin >> x) and x != '\n')
    // do stuff

So that when cin encounters a newline in the stream, it exits the input loop (as it would normally do with say, EOF).

Answer 1

Using >> operator directly won’t work, because as you say it skips whitespace including newlines.

What you can do is to read a single line using std::getline, and then you can read all input from the line with std::stringstream.

std::string line;
if (std::getline(std::cin, line)) {
    std::istringstream ss(line);
    int x;
    while (ss >> x) {
        //....
    }
}