Formatted input

[vaibhav]

I want to input two variables like a/b.One book suggest this as

int a,b;
char dummychar;
cin>>a>>dummychar>>b;

Can anyone explain why above code gives the desired result.Also is there any other way out.In C we used to do it as

scanf("%d/%d",&a,&b);

Also please give me a link to other aspect of formatted input in C++.

[SlyMaelstrom]

Because '/' is a character and you can't read in a character into an integer. If you did the stream would fail.

cin >> a >> b;
// a = value of a
// The stream fails at second input and all cin statements 
// are ignored for the rest of the program

The dummy character is there to read the input that you don't want.