Thread: How to read empty string from command line

Hi I wanted to have my program behave in the following way:

"Please press enter when you are ready."

and then it would wait until you've pressed enter. But I've found no way of just reading a carriage return. I've hacked my around it by making the program expect something like an int i.e.

int x = 0;

cin >> x;

Forcing the user to hit an arbitary number on the keypad and then press Enter.

I've read up on getline() and cin.ignore() but I don't think those are what I'm looking for.

Any help would be really appreciated. thanks!

If i remember right yu can try

system("pause");

or

cin.getline();

or

getch();

Last one requires the conio.h header

Originally Posted by joeyzt

system("pause");

dont use this. it is about as overkill as you can possibly go...

try: cin.get();

I like to use getline(), since it cleans out the keyboard input buffer, including the '\n' (for the benefit of subsequent >>cin or getline() operations.

Something like:

Code:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
  void wait_for_enter(void);
  char name[BUFSIZ];

  std::cout << "Let's play a game: " << std::endl << std::endl;
  std::cout << "Press \"Enter\" when you are ready: ";
  wait_for_enter();
  std::cout << std::endl << "  OK! Ready to begin" << std::endl;
  std::cout << std::endl << "  Please enter your name: ";
  std::cin.getline(name, sizeof(name));
  std::cout << std::endl << "  Hi, " << name << std::endl;
 // etc.
 // etc.
  return 0;
}
  
void wait_for_enter(void)
{
  char ch[BUFSIZ];
  std::cin.getline(ch, sizeof(ch));
}

whups i meant cin.get();

not cin.getline();

but for whatever reason my program does not wait for the user even with cin.get() or cin.getline().

eg.

Code:

cout << "press enter to begin" << endl; 

cin.get();

cout << "blah blah blah";

when this code is executed the program will print

press enter to begin
blah blah blah

without waiting for a carriage return input from the user after the first line is printed.

>>for whatever reason my program does not wait for the user even with cin.get() or cin.getline().
Prior calls to cin using the >> operator will likely leave a newline in the input stream. This will cause both get and getline terminate immediately without waiting for input as you would expect. If you have no qualms against flushing the input stream then this will work just fine for you.

Code:

std::cin.ignore(std::numeric_limits<std::streamsize>::max(), '\n');

Do not forget to include <limits> as it holds numeric_limits.

A better solution of course is to eschew formatted input in favor of line input and a manual conversion.

that did the trick!

thank you all.