C string one character shorter than defined length?

Question

Very new to c++ and I have the following code:

char input[3];

cout << "Enter input: ";
cin.getline(input,sizeof(input));
cout << input;

And entering something like abc will only output ab, cutting it one character short. The defined length is 3 characters so why is it only capturing 2 characters?

Answer 1

Remember that c-strings are null terminated. To store 3 characters you need to allocate space for 4 because of the null terminator.

Also as the @MikeSeymour mentioned in the comments in c++ its best to avoid the issue completely and use std::string.