Trying to show only the first letter of a string

[SolidSora]

I need to make a program that outputs a name based on the users input. For the middle name I'm only supposed to show the middle initial. But the way I have my code written causes an error.

#include<iomanip>
#include<iostream>
#include<string>

using namespace std;

string firstName;
string lastName;
string middleName;
string middleInitial;

int main(){
	cout<<"Enter your first Name: "; cin>>firstName;
	cout<<"Enter your middle name or initial: "; cin>>middleName;
	cout<<"Enter your last name: "; cin>>lastName;
	cout<<"Your name is: "<<endl;
	for(int i=0; i<middleName.length; i++){
		middleInitial = middleName[1];
	}

	cout<<lastName <<", " <<firstName<<" " <<middleInitial <<endl;
}

[Ancient Dragon]

what is the error??? Please don't make us guess.

You don't need a loop just to get the first letter of the string, so you can just delete lines 17, 18 and 29. cout<<lastName <<", " <<firstName<<" " <<middleName[0] <<endl;

[Narue]

>middleName.length
Length is a member function, not a data member. I'd also recommend using size() instead of length(), since length() is specific to the string class while size() is used in the standard container libraries.

[template<>]

Access first letter using index 0 not 1, but make sure user entered a middle name by checking size()

int main( int argc, char *argv[])
{
    std::string middle;
    std::cout<<"Enter your middle name: "; std::getline(std::cin,middle);

    if( middle.size() )
    {
        std::cout << "middle initial is=[" << middle[0]  << "]" << std::endl;
    }
    else
    {
        std::cout << "no middle name" << std::endl;
    }
}