fstream and formatting

Hello I have a question...we are in spring break at school so I can't get in touch with my teacher. Can some kind soul explain what functions I may use to format my program so when it prints out it is all in line...notes from classmate say use library functions??
ex
john doe 111-45-6723
jane doe 234-55-1212

you are going to have to do a better job explaining what you want...

ofsteam fin;
fin<< "John Doe 999-99-9999";

prints everying in a line to a file

cout << "blah blah blah";

prints everything in a line to standard output (monitor).

What exactly are you trying to do? What OS? What compiler? Or any relevant information at all would be nice...

sorry i didnt give relevant info i dont want people to think that i want them to do my work for me....what i need to do is read in info from a file. the file states the persons first and last name, age, and ss# in a line.....what i need to do is read that info in and then format it so everything lines up
ex( i read in)
john doe 18 123-45-6789
jane doe 21 234-56-7890
carrie doe 111 456-78-9012

once i out put that info i need to have the info displayed to the screen in a line
all first names line up
all last names line up
all ages line up
all ss#'s line up

my os is microsoft windows and my compiler is visual c++
does that help????=)

You need to look up setw(), in <iomanip>

os << setw(10) << name << " " << setw(2) << age; //etc

shouldn't carrie doe be carrie allota doe

sorry bad pun...

The problem with setw() is that it reads the characters from the end of output and lines up the characters based on what is left over... so

cout << setw(5) << "joe";

would put two spaces and the 'joe'.

but

cout << setw(5) << "joel";

would only put one space and then 'joel'.

The best way I can think to do it would be to get the size of the string (char array, whatever) that you have and subtract that from a number that can represent available spaces after the string, then use a while loop to output those spaces. Then place your next string, subtract spaces, while loop remaining spaces, place next string. Make sense?

so lets say you want names to be no longer than 20 characters, then you want 'at least' five spaces. The number you would have is 25.

Joe has three letters, so you would output 22 spaces after joe and place the age.

Well ages won't be more than three characters, and you would want 'at least' 5 spaces... so the number would be eight.

An age of 97 would give you six spaces after whereas an age of 100 would give you five spaces.

Then you put the social security number, newline, and do the process again.