problems with date entry

[black_watch]

Hi everyone this is my first post, please be nice
so i am writing a paintball booking program as a project i am doing allright but i have to check for invalid date entries in my input by reading the string input into a buffer that will accomodate the largest string size. At the moment the date is input into three seperate char arrays, dd, mm, yyyy. I am stumped as to how i can read the string input into a buffer to check for errors >.< i think i might need to use cin.read() but im not sure how this works and which arguements i should pass, thanks for your help

[Daved]

It sounds like you are using C style strings. There are functions available to find a character in a string (like '/') or tokenize based on a character. There are also functions to convert to integers so you can validate that the month is between 1 and 12 and stuff like that. I don't think you need cin.read() for that, just cin >> or getline.

The same types of options are available with C++ strings and stringstreams which I find easier deal with and harder to mess up.

[treenef]

Try this perhaps,

http://www.daniweb.com/code/snippet367.html

A useful snippet from one of our cprog members, if you might be having trouble handling actual dates.

And I found this useful

http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/string.html

string::iterator my_iter;
for(my_iter = my_string.begin(); my_string != my_string.end(); my_iter++)
{
    cout<<*my_iter;
}

If you use the iterator method look out for this little bug btw

string::iterator my_iter;
for(my_iter = my_string.begin(); my_iter  != my_string.end(); my_iter++)
{
    cout<<*my_iter;
}

[black_watch]

thanks for your replies everyone i figured it'd be a simple cin with an array or with loops or something but the instruction is worded like this:

•Check for invalid entries such as the length of the date string.
Note: The string should be read into a buffer that will accommodate the longest string that can be entered at the keyboard.

so i figured it'd be something complicated i guess not thanks for help