cin.clear()
doesn’t clear the standard input. What it does is clearing error bits, like eofbit
, failbit
and others, and sets the stream into a good state. Maybe you expected it to clear out anything in it? If the user typed
yes no
Just before, and you
cin >> someStringVariable;
It will read up to no
and the stream will still contain
no
The call to clear
then clears any error bits being active. Then, your
cin>>addAntonymAnswer1;
Will read the no
that wasn’t eaten by the previous read, and the action immediately returns, not waiting for new input. What you should do is doing a clear
followed by an ignore, up to the next newline. You tell it the amount of characters it should ignore maximally. That amount should be the highest number possible:
cin.clear();
cin.ignore(std::numeric_limits<std::streamsize>::max(), '\n');
Doing that will make the stream empty, and a following read will wait for you to type something in.
Another problem arises if you have got a cin >>
followed by a getline
: The cin will leave any whitespace (also newlines) after its read token, but getline
will stop reading after it hits such a newline. I see you have put clear
after nearly everything. So i want to show you when you need it and when not. You don’t need it when you sequence multiple cin >>
. Assume you have in your buffer: “foo\nbar\n”. Then you do the following reads
cin >> a; // 1
cin >> b; // 2
After the first, your buffer will contain “\nbar\n”. That is, the newline is still in. The second cin>>
will first skip all whitespace and newlines, so that it can cope with \n
being at the front of bar
. Now, you can also sequence multiple getline
calls:
getline(cin, a);
getline(cin, b);
Getline will throw away the \n
that it reads at the line end, but won’t ignore newlines or whitespace at the begin. So, after the first getline, the buffer contains “bar\n”. The second getline will correctly read “bar\n” too. Now, let’s consider the case where you need the clear/ignore:
cin >> a;
getline(cin, b);
The first will leave the stream as “\nbar\n”. The getline then will see immediately the \n
at the begin, and will think it read an empty line. Thus, it will immediately continue and not wait for anything, leaving the stream as “bar\n”. So, if you have a getline
after a cin>>
you should first execute the clear/ignore sequence, to clear out the newline. But between getline
or cin>>
‘s, you should not do it.