Question

This is driving me nuts. I have been at it for over 2 hours trying to figure this out…

Here is my problem. I am working on a fairly large program that works with Bayesian networks. Here is the main function:

using namespace std;

int main()
{  
    DSL_network net;
    initializeNetwork(net); 
    setEvidence(net);
    net.SetDefaultBNAlgorithm(7);
    net.SetNumberOfSamples(80000);
    cout << "Samples:\t" << net.GetNumberOfSamples() << endl;
    updateEvidence(net);
    //net.WriteFile("test.dsl");
    return(DSL_OKAY);
}

This all works fine. The problem comes when I want to print out a string:

using namespace std;

int main()
{  
    //simple string creation
    string a = "test";
    //should print out "test"
    cout << a << endl;
    DSL_network net;
    initializeNetwork(net); 
    setEvidence(net);
    net.SetDefaultBNAlgorithm(7);
    net.SetNumberOfSamples(80000);
    cout << "Samples:\t" << net.GetNumberOfSamples() << endl;
    updateEvidence(net);
    //net.WriteFile("test.dsl");
    return(DSL_OKAY);
}

Here is the output (just from printing the string a…):

   ▀ÇΦy♠≈6 ♦

What could be going on?

UPDATE:

int main()
    {  
        //simple string creation
        string a = "test";
        //should print out "test"
        cout << a << endl;
        return(DSL_OKAY);
    }

still prints

▀ÇΦy♠≈6 ♦

BIG UPDATE:
Here is the recent. I created a brand new project and pasted the code that Neil Butterworth posted (thanks btw). I ran the code and it printed correctly. Then I added the two .lib files to the Linker in the new project (smile.lib for the SMILE library, and wsock32.lib for socket use.)

I tried the code again, and it printed the first “test” correctly, then it printed the giberish. It is a problem with one of the .libs I am linking together. I tried each on their own to see if they are just clashing, and it seems that the smile.lib library is causing the problem. I will need to go into their documentation and figure out why.

Any ideas?

Thanks all for the help

Thanks

Answer 1

That’s bizarre. I always like to break a problem down to it’s minimal case. What does the following program do when you run it?

using namespace std;
int main() {  
    string a = "test";
    cout << a << endl;
    return 0;
}

If that works, then there’s something else wrong and you need to add in one line at a time until it fails. Then examine that line very carefully (“I’m hunting wabbits”).

Based on your edit, it may be a different string class being used. Try this:

int main() {  
    std::string a = "test";
    std::cout << a << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

Update:

Since it works in a new project and not the current one, check the following.

• Make sure you’re linking with the standard C++ runtimes.
• make sure you don’t #define string as something else (and the includes a -Dstring=somethingelse command line option to the compiler).
• check the behavior using std::string, not just string.