Converting string to ASCII

Question

I was just trying something out and made the following code. It is supposed to take each individual letter in a string and print its ASCII equivalent. However, when there is a space, it stops converting. Here is the code:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;

void convertToASCII(string letter)
{
    for (int i = 0; i < letter.length(); i++)
    {
        char x = letter.at(i);
        cout << int(x) << endl;
    }
}

int main()
{
    string plainText;
    cout << "Enter text to convert to ASCII: ";
    cin >> plainText;
    convertToASCII(plainText);
    return 0;
}

Any ideas on why this happens?

Answer 1

cin >> plainText reads from the input up to, but excluding, the first whitespace character. You probably want std::getline(cin, plainText) instead.

References:

• std::getline
• istream& operator>> (istream& is, string& str)

Answer 2

The formatted input function operator>> on istream stops extraction from the stream if it hits a space. So your string doesn't contain the rest of the input.

If you wish to read until the end of the line, use getline instead:

string plainText;
cout << "Enter text to convert to ASCII: ";
getline(cin, plainText);
convertToASCII(plainText);