basic C++ question

[Guest Gnome Chomsky]

I'm fairly new to C++ but I have experience in C. I asked some people and they don't know so I thought I'd post the question on here. 

 

Is there a way to print multiple line breaks without putting cout << endl << endl << endl << endl etc etc etc? 

 

I know you can do cout << "\n\n\n\n\n etc etc etc" but I prefer endl over "\n". 

 

I tried cout << 5endl and cout << endl*5 but neither of those worked. Is it tacky stylistically to put a bunch of endl's? I like a lot of space in my programs. 

[TakeruK]

I'm not an expert on C++. Like you, I know C and I have used a bit of C++ only. But here are my thoughts:

 

Having a bunch of blank spaces in your output sounds like a good idea to me. Sometimes I also use "***********" or "----------------" strings to help me see different sections.

 

I don't think stuff like endl*5 would work because endl is probably encoded as some unicode value or something and multiplying that value by 5 might result in something undesired?

 

I think your best bet, for simple code, is cout << "\n\n\n\n\n"

 

I'm not sure what you mean by saying you prefer endl over \n. When I looked up the difference, I see that the only difference between endl and \n (new line) is that endl will flush a buffered stream. cout is not a buffered stream, so the behaviour of endl and \n is going to be the same in this case? Unless you mean you prefer reading/writing code with "endl" instead of "\n". If so, that's fine but I would point out that "\n" is something used in many different languages while I have not seen "endl" in many other places than C++ (I'm sure it exists, but I feel that "\n" is the standard "new line" character).

[MikKar]

C++ isn't really the language for doing text manipulation and the like. endl or "\n" is the best thing you can use, otherwise if that is a possibility for you, using regular expressions instead of C++ as they'll probably be much more efficient to do that sort of thing.

 

There are different schools with regards to what is better between endl or "\n", my personal *preference* is to stick to the basic STL and go with std::endl. For (elaborate) text manipulation I prefer using sed if I am on Linux/Unix.

Edited September 10, 2013 by MikKar

[gnufoo]

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

 

int main() {

      int numberOfNewLines = 5;

 

      for(int i = 0; i < numberOfNewLines; i++)

          cout << endl;

}