Assignment 2 Question 3

I have the following code:

int main () {

ifstream fin;
ofstream fout;

cout << "Enter the name of the input file: ";
cin >> fin;

cout << "Enter the name of the output file: ";
cin >> fout;

I'm getting the error ambiguous overload for the line in bold.
How should I be writing this? The names of the files are given by the user so I would have thought that's the best way to write it

I dont know if this is the best way to do this but it should work.

Declare a character array to store the filename (apparently a string should work as well, but I seem to remember having trouble with that) and assign the users input to that.

e.g

int main() {

char Filename[20];
ifstream fin;
ofstream fout;

cout << "Enter filename: ";
cin >> Filename;

fin.open(Filename);

Obviously you would need 2 variables, one for input and one for output.
I hope this helps.

Thanks, I'll try that.

Tracey,

Like how Morris showed you above, the name of a file should be a character string array and not a stream like cin, your fin or cout! The fin that you declared in your code above is an input stream object (for reading from a file) equivalent to cin (when you are reading from the keyboad).

You can declare a string representing the name of your file but it will need to be converted to a character string array (old C style) as the constructor/open method for the ifstream and ofstream classes expect a character string array terminated by '\0' character hence you declare it like:

char Filename[20];

Else you could declare it as:

string Filename;
ifstream fin;
ofstream fout;
.
.
.
fin.open(Filename.c_str());
...

Obviously, you need to #include <cstring> for the function c_str().

Hope this explanation will assist you.

Cheers,

Shupi.

How do you declare the string #N#? In the example in the textbook they only have one character that has to be replaced so they declare it as a char, but when its three characters together, do you declare it as a string then search for it and replace it with the name?

Hi Trace,

Well, the string #N#, like you have mentioned is a string hence you should declare it as a string. Since it's a string literal that doesn't change I suggest you should declare it as a constant like

const string ANY_NAME = "#N#";

Cheers.

You can access each character of a string uisng the c_str() function. Alternativley use a char array instead of a string. Either should work.