Question

The code is as follow :

The Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main(void)
{
    int id;
    char name[50];
    ifstream myfile("savingaccount.txt");  //open the file
    myfile >> id;

    myfile.getline(name , 255 , '\n');   //read name **second line of the file
    cout << id ;
    cout << "\n" << name << endl; //Error part : only print out partial name 
    return 0;
}

The File Content:

1800567
Ho Rui Jang
21
Female
Malaysian
012-4998192
20 , Lorong 13 , Taman Patani Janam
Melaka
Sungai Dulong

The Problem :

1.)I expect the getline will read the name into the char array name and then I can print out the name , the thing is instead of getting the full name , I only get partial of the name , why this happen?

Thank you!

Answer 1

The problem is that myfile >> id does not consume the newline (\n) at the end of the first line. Thus, when you call getline it will read from the end of the ID until the end of that line, and you will get an empty string. If you call again getline it will actually return the name.

std::string name; // By using std::getline() you can use std::string
                  // instead of a char array

myfile >> id;
std::getline(myfile, name); // this one will be empty
std::getline(myfile, name); // this one will contain the name

My advise would be to just use std::getline for all the lines and if a line contains a number you can just convert it using std::stoi (if your compiler supports C++11) or boost::lexical_cast.