Clearing istream

Does anyone know a way of clearing the istream to stop the program skipping cin lines which should pause to accept data. I've tried using cin.ignore(256,'\n'), but I don't want the user to press enter all the time to clear the buffer stream.

I've tried cin.ignore(256) but that just freezes the program, any ideas?

Thanks.

If your reading this can you please post something, any ideas at all. I really need some help on this.

try this....

if ( cin.fail() )
{
cin.clear();
cin.ignore (256,'\n');
// either get input again or go back to get input etc. depends on how your code is structured
}

Is there any chance that you could explain what cin.fail is checking for e.g. over loaded buffer stream?, what does cin.clear do?

a stream is said to have a state.
there are four flags you can check that tell you the state of the stream.

good
bad
fail
eof

good can be checked with cin.good() .This will return true if no input error occured.
bad can be checked with cin.bad() .This returns true if a FATAL error has occured.
fail can be checked with cin.fail() .This returns true if a recoverable error has occurred.
eof can be checked with cin.eof() . This returns true if the end of file has been reached.For a keyboard and windows/dos os that is ctrl-z.

cin.clear() clears the state of the stream. This basically means you are clearing the failbit so that the cin.ignore will work. Input ops on a failed stream do not work.

Thank you very much. Trying to find information like that in the borland help files is hopeless.

Quote:

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Originally posted by cplus
Does anyone know a way of clearing the istream to stop the program skipping cin lines which should pause to accept data. I've tried using cin.ignore(256,'\n'), but I don't want the user to press enter all the time to clear the buffer stream.

I've tried cin.ignore(256) but that just freezes the program, any ideas?

Thanks.

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Do you mean it appears that the program skips over some cin>> lines?
If you mix input of numbers, and strings/chars you may get problems.
Say you tell the user to input a number.

int x;
cout << "Enter a int value : ";
cin >> x;

Then you ask them to enter some text

char buffer[100];
cout << "What is your first name : ";
cin.getline(buffer,99);

The problem is that when they entered the number in the first cin statement, the \n from pressing enter is still sitting in the input buffer, and the call to getline sees that \n and stops there.
You need go call cin.ignore(100,'\n'); after inputting numbers before you switch to using getline.