Measuring String Length

[Waseemn]

Hello All,

Its me again with my quirky questions.

I am writing a program for homework and the idea is to sort the top 3 runners by their finishing time.

Also a requirement of the homework is to gather the names of the runners along side their times. The user should enter a name that would not overflow the array. I have:

const int iLength = 21; //20 Chars + 1 null terminator.

and

//3 char. variables to hold 3 user input.
char cRunner1[iLength], cRunner2[iLength], cRunner3[iLength];

and

//Accept the name of the runner.
cout << "Name of Runner number 1: ";
cin.getline(cRunner1, iLength);

I would like to put the last two lines in a While Loop to prevent the user from going over the 20 character limit, but I do not know how to figure out the length of the string entered.

Any help and clarification will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Ancient Dragon]

>> would like to put the last two lines in a While Loop to prevent the user from going over >>the 20 character limit,

When you use getline() that isn't necessary because getline() will no accept more than iLength number of characters including the string null terminator.

[Waseemn]

Thanks Ancient Dragon

So I understand that getline() will limit the user's input to what I place in iLength, so iLength should be 20 or 21 to allow up to 20 characters?

In other words do I need to reserve the string null terminator's position manually or will the getline() take care of it automatically.

Thanks again.

[Ancient Dragon]

If you want 20 characters then iLength = 21 is correct. getline() will insure that no more than 20 characers are put into the input buffer.

If you change to using c++ std::string then you don't have to worry about the length at all because std::string will expand to fit however many characters are typed from the keyboard (I think there is a limit of 32,525 or something like that, but I hardly doubt anyone is going to type that many charcters.)