Read input numbers separated by spaces

Question

This may be a total beginner's question, but I have yet to find an answer that works for me.

Currently, I'm writing a program for a class that takes in a user's input (which can be one or more numbers separated by spaces), then determines whether the number is prime, perfect, or neither. If the number is perfect, then it will display the divisors.

Thus far, I've already written the code for the prime, perfect, and listing the divisors. I'm stuck on the input portion of my program. I don't know how to get the input that's separated by spaces to go through my loops one at a time.

This is my current program:

cout<<"Enter a number, or numbers separated by a space, between 1 and 1000."<<endl; cin>>num;  while (divisor<=num)     if(num%divisor==0)     {         cout<<divisor<<endl;         total=total+divisor;         divisor++;     }     else divisor++; if(total==num*2)     cout<<"The number you entered is perfect!"<<endl; else cout<<"The number you entered is not perfect!"<<endl;   if(num==2||num==3||num==5||num==7)     cout<<"The number you entered is prime!"<<endl;  else if(num%2==0||num%3==0||num%5==0||num%7==0)     cout<<"The number you entered is not prime!"<<endl; else cout<<"The number you entered is prime!"<<endl;  return 0; 

It works, but only for a single number. If anyone could help me to get it to be able to read multiple inputs separated by spaces, it'd be greatly appreciated. Also, just a side note, I do not know how many numbers will be entered, so I can't just make a variable for each one. It will be a random amount of numbers.

Thanks!

Answer 1

By default, cin reads from the input discarding any spaces. So, all you have to do is to use a do while loop to read the input more than one time:

do {    cout<<"Enter a number, or numbers separated by a space, between 1 and 1000."<<endl;    cin >> num;     // reset your variables     // your function stuff (calculations) } while (true); // or some condition 

Answer 2

I would recommend reading in the line into a string, then splitting it based on the spaces. For this, you can use the getline(...) function. The trick is having a dynamic sized data structure to hold the strings once it's split. Probably the easiest to use would be a vector.

#include <string> #include <vector> ...   string rawInput;   vector<String> numbers;   while( getline( cin, rawInput, ' ' ) )   {     numbers.push_back(rawInput);   } 

So say the input looks like this:

Enter a number, or numbers separated by a space, between 1 and 1000. 10 5 20 1 200 7 

You will now have a vector, numbers, that contains the elements: {"10","5","20","1","200","7"}.

Note that these are still strings, so not useful in arithmetic. To convert them to integers, we use a combination of the STL function, atoi(...), and because atoi requires a c-string instead of a c++ style string, we use the string class' c_str() member function.

while(!numbers.empty()) {   string temp = numbers.pop_back();//removes the last element from the string   num = atoi( temp.c_str() ); //re-used your 'num' variable from your code    ...//do stuff } 

Now there's some problems with this code. Yes, it runs, but it is kind of clunky, and it puts the numbers out in reverse order. Lets re-write it so that it is a little more compact:

#include <string> ... string rawInput; cout << "Enter a number, or numbers separated by a space, between 1 and 1000." << endl; while( getline( cin, rawInput, ' ') ) {   num = atoi( rawInput.c_str() );   ...//do your stuff } 

There's still lots of room for improvement with error handling (right now if you enter a non-number the program will crash), and there's infinitely more ways to actually handle the input to get it in a usable number form (the joys of programming!), but that should give you a comprehensive start. :)

Note: I had the reference pages as links, but I cannot post more than two since I have less than 15 posts :/

Edit: I was a little bit wrong about the atoi behavior; I confused it with Java's string->Integer conversions which throw a Not-A-Number exception when given a string that isn't a number, and then crashes the program if the exception isn't handled. atoi(), on the other hand, returns 0, which is not as helpful because what if 0 is the number they entered? Let's make use of the isdigit(...) function. An important thing to note here is that c++ style strings can be accessed like an array, meaning rawInput[0] is the first character in the string all the way up to rawInput[length - 1].

#include <string> #include <ctype.h> ... string rawInput; cout << "Enter a number, or numbers separated by a space, between 1 and 1000." << endl; while( getline( cin, rawInput, ' ') ) {   bool isNum = true;   for(int i = 0; i < rawInput.length() && isNum; ++i)   {     isNum = isdigit( rawInput[i]);   }    if(isNum)   {     num = atoi( rawInput.c_str() );     ...//do your stuff   }   else     cout << rawInput << " is not a number!" << endl; } 

The boolean (true/false or 1/0 respectively) is used as a flag for the for-loop, which steps through each character in the string and checks to see if it is a 0-9 digit. If any character in the string is not a digit, the loop will break during it's next execution when it gets to the condition "&& isNum" (assuming you've covered loops already). Then after the loop, isNum is used to determine whether to do your stuff, or to print the error message.