C/C++ Practice Questions on User Input Problem 10

This is my series on C/C++ problems for accepting user input in a robust way. The questions of this series start from C programs, and they slowly build and convert to classes, and which further build into inheritance. This is Problem 10 of this series.

Last Reviewed and Updated on February 7, 2020
Posted by Parveen(Hoven),
Aptitude Trainer and Software Developer

User Input - Problem 10

Change class in the previous program, i.e., in problem 9, to a base class so that it has all the mechanism to accept up to 10 characters from the console.

Solution
/*
The base class CConsoleBase holds all the code for reading a string
from the console and limit it to 10 characters.
We can then derive classes from this class for specialized
console input, such as a string class, integer class, double
class and so on. In this example we are writing the string
class CConsoleString that is derived from CConsoleBase
*/
// include all the headers
#include "conio.h"
#include
<iostream>

class CConsoleBase
{

public:
    // the maximum limit allowed, use a static const
    // initialize here itself
    static const int iMAXCHARS = 10;

protected:
    char m_cBuff [iMAXCHARS + 3 +
    /*take two more so that overflow can be detected*/2];

    char* m_cReturn;

    // the length of string entered by the user.
    // this length is required during cleanup when
    // we flush the unwanted characters. so we make it
    // a private member
    int m_iInputLength;

public:
    // constructor
    CConsoleBase ()
    {

        // requirement for _cgets
        m_cBuff [0] = (iMAXCHARS + 2) + 1;

    }

    // destructor
    ~CConsoleBase ()
    {

        // cleanup
        // Robust programming -
        // remove any unwanted, unread characters from
        // the stream
        if (iMAXCHARS == m_iInputLength) _cgets (m_cBuff);

        do
        {

            m_cReturn = _cgets (m_cBuff);

        }while (0 != m_cReturn [0]);

    }

protected:
    // returns success if the user enters a string <= 10 chars
    bool ReadConsoleString ()
    {

        m_cReturn = NULL;

        int iLoopCtr = 0;

        m_cReturn = _cgets (m_cBuff);

        // save length in a variable. Why are we saving it ?
        m_iInputLength = strlen (m_cReturn);

        return (m_iInputLength <= iMAXCHARS);

    }

};

class CConsoleString : public CConsoleBase
{

public:
    inline bool TakeStringInput ()
    {

        return ReadConsoleString ();

    }

    inline const char* DisplayStringInput ()
    {

        return this->m_cReturn;

    }

};

int main ()
{

    CConsoleString obj;

    printf (
    "Enter a string [<= %u characters]: ",
    CConsoleBase::iMAXCHARS);

    if (obj.TakeStringInput ())
    printf ("You entered '%s'\n",
    obj.DisplayStringInput ());

    else
    printf ("Truncated input is '%s'\n",
    obj.DisplayStringInput ());

    return 0;

}


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This Blog Post/Article "C/C++ Practice Questions on User Input Problem 10" by Parveen (Hoven) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Updated on 2020-02-07. Published on: 2015-12-20