Thread: Why first getline doesnt work?

Getline is reading the newline after the i, since all you're doing with the first >> is reading a single character.

You're generally better off reading each line (using getline) into a buffer, then parsing that buffer to see what it contains.

Mixing and matching input styles is always a bug at some point.

have a call to the ignore function before your getline so that the '\n' from the previous line won't be parsed by the getline function causing it to read nothing and thus throwing off your data >> age line

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char * argv[])
{
	ifstream data("read.txt");
	char * name = new char[256]; //same as char name[256]
	int age;
	char instr;
    if(data.is_open()){
        data >> instr;
        data.ignore(1, '\n');
        data.getline(name, 256, '\n');
        data >> age;
        cout << "instr -> " << instr
             << endl << "name -> " << name
             << endl << "age -> " << age;
    }
    else
        cout << "could not open file";

    cin.get();
    return 0;
}

Originally Posted by codeprada

have a call to the ignore function before your getline so that the '\n' from the previous line won't be parsed by the getline function causing it to read nothing and thus throwing off your data >> age line

Gah! All C with some convenient C++ stuff mixed in. Let's fix this.

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char * argv[])
{
	ifstream data("read.txt");
	std::string name;
	int age;
	char instr;
    if(data.is_open()){
        data >> instr;
        data.ignore(1, '\n');
        getline(name, cin);
        data >> age;
        cout << "instr -> " << instr
             << endl << "name -> " << name
             << endl << "age -> " << age;
    }
    else
        cout << "could not open file";

    cin.get();
    return 0;
}

This is better. Though it still doesn't handle invalid input.