Thread: cin

Or you can do while loop and read characters using getch (conio.h library). This function returns one character each time user presses a key. Terminate the loop when this character equals to 13 (this indicates user pressed Enter key). This is more complicated, but gives you control over the process and you can specify how to display characters user writes (or even if to display).

Try this: It works fine.

Code:

#include <conio.h>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
  const int limit = 255;  //or whatever
  char *text = (char*)malloc(limit);
  int i = 0;
  for (char input = getch(); 13 != input; i++, input = getch()) {
    text[i] = input;
    cout << input;
  }
  text[i] = '\0';  //add terminator to the end
  return 0;
}

for instance, say a user inputs "This is a test." i'd like ot assign that to a char

You can't assign string to a char. You can assign string to array of chars - that's what my code does. More complicated version of my code would allocate text array dynamically, but you probably don't need this. The easiest thing is to use <string> library. It gives you string datatype which simplifies string operations as much as possible.

when i try to use getline, the program does not give me a chance to enter a string... ?

This is because you are calling it after a cin>> operation. The previous cin>> left a newline char in the stream buffer and getline encountered that and thought that input was over. After calling cin>> but before the cin.getline() add this line :-
cin.ignore(80,'\n');
This will get rid of the newline from the buffer and allow getline to function normally.