Stopping a user from typeing.

Ok, lets say I wrote a small program that asks the user for his/her
username, etc, etc.

How can I stop the user from typeing input after about 10
characters?

For instances, the cursor will just sit there after the user has
entered 10 characters waiting for the enter button, and the
user can easily correct what he or she typed by pressing back
space etc, etc.

Is there a way to do this in a dos like atmoshere(win32 console)?
Programming: win32 console | Compiler: MSVC++

i suppose you could do it a long way round and every ime a character is entered increment a counter and add the char on to the end of the 'string'. Then when it reaches the limit, you could stop it moving (move it back) and stop adding on the characters
????

I know of no way to prevent user from entering erroneous data. However, there are ways to protect the program from such abuse. First you can have a policy that all input will be as strings. You would do this becaue "there is no such thing as a bad string", whereas if input is to be an int and somebody inputs a string or a double it could crash the program. You can convert the string to any type necessary once it has been input and it's value to be appropriate. You can limit the amount of data input into the string using get() or getline(). To clear the input buffer of any remaining "erroneous" input you can call the ignore() member function of the istream using an appropriately large number as the first parameter. It's not perfect, but it's the only way I know short of working directly with the istream input buffer.

get() by no means protects a user from overwriting memory, so you must use fgets().

As to the original question, I don't know...

You could do some like this:

Code:

---

#include <iostream>
#include <conio.h>

using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char* argv[])

{
        char username[11]={0};
        char temp;

        for (int i=0;i<10;i++)
        {
                temp=getch();
                if(temp=='\r')
                {
                        cout << endl;
                        break;
                }
                else
                {
                        cout << temp;
                        username[i]=temp;
                }
        }

        cout << username << endl;
       
        return 0;

}

---

You have to add some code to handle backspaces and pause if the max number of charaters is entered.