(C++) cin.ignore question

[blashmet]

I am slightly confused as to how cin.ignore works. I'll try to make this short. I need to write a program where the user inputs a bunch of data in 1 string, for example : 46728s1000 2750.55John Brown

I need to extract the different parts of that input. I need to extract the first 5 digits, the 's', the 1000, the 2750.55 and John Brown.

int getInformation (bool isFirstInput)

{	int accountNumber;
	char accountType;
	int minBalance;
	double oldBalance;
	string firstNamelastName;
	const string welcomeMessage = "Welcome to Brandon Lashmet's payroll program\n. Please enter account number, account type, minimum balance, a space, old balance, and first and last name of account owner.";

	if (isFirstInput==true)
	{
		cout<<welcomeMessage;
	}
	else
	{
		cout<< "Thank you. Please enter next user's information";
	}

		cin>> accountNumber;
		cin.ignore(5);
		cin>> accountType;
		cin.ignore(6);
		cin>> minBalance; 
		cin.ignore(11);
		cin>> oldBalance;
		getline(cin, firstNamelastName);

}

Does anyone have any idea how this works? Thanks.

[ViZioN]

I've never used cin.ignore myself by there's more info and example code here

[blashmet]

Thanks for the reply. My next question is how do I extract the first 5 numbers from that user inputted string? cin.ignore ignores them, not extracts them.

[spartyjohnson]

I am not a big C++ user, but in c# I would read the entire input and then use string functions to look at it. From there you could split it up. From this site: c++ reference it seems like you can use the brackets [] operator to access a part of the string. There is also a length method in the class. Hope this helps.

[night_stalker_z]

Try this link:

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostrea...eam/ignore.html

[blashmet]

Hmm that bracket thing looks interesting. How would that work exactly with the syntax? Like how would i get it to store the first five chars in a variable? I'm not quite following the code on the site.

[spartyjohnson]

again, I am not a c++ developer, but I think it would be kind of like this

string variable;

cin >> variable;

string part1;

part1 = variable[0] + variable[1] + variable[2] + variable[3] + variable [4]; //messy concatenation, sure there is a better function

in c# this would be much easier, but seems like you need to use c++ for some reason.

I am sure the std::str library provides much easier functions, but that is a [downside] of c++, way too many options and libraries to choose from.

[ViZioN]

You could also use strtok to split a string using a delimiter, such as a : or = between each item in the string. Just google strtok