Age program advise

[GDog63]

Can anybody could help me in modifying this program?

It asks for the user to enter his/her age. When the input returns it displays a message.

However I want the program to reconize if the user types in a letter or word. The coniditonal statement I have set up only seems to work when the age variable is set to CHAR. But if its an INT, data type; the window closes whenever it goes to check for a letter.

Im using Codeblocks with Vista 32bit.
Here's the code:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
char age;

cout<<"Please input your age: ";
cin>> age;
cin.ignore();
if ( age < 100 ) {
cout<<"You are fairly young.\n";
cin.ignore();
return 0;
}
else (!age); {
cout<<"That's a letter! ";
cin.ignore();
return 0;
}
}

[jsmith]

if( !cin ) 
    cout << "That's a letter!";
else if( age < 100 ) 
    // etc 

[GDog63]

Jsmith

The DOS window still insists on closing. Could it have something to do with the user, pressing the enter button for the command to start?

[jsmith]

The shell window in Windows closes immediately after the program exits. Because of this,
you need to pause your program in some way. Search around here; there are plenty of
posts that show ways to do that.

[GDog63]

The variable age, only checks if the user enters a letter or number. The problem I'm having is with double digits. Let's say someone entered 34. Because Age is a CHAR, it can only retain 1 byte of info. So is there a way to retain both numerical and character data without having to assign another variable?

So far it grants having typed a letter or 1's value and prints.

[firedraco]

You can use an std::string.

[jsmith]

Use std::getline to read into a std::string as firedraco mentioned, then
convert the string to integer. In this case, if the conversion fails, you
know the input was not numeric.

Look up strtoul(); it is what you will need.

(Or boost::lexical_cast<> if you have and can use boost).

[GDog63]

Im sorry but Im still new at this.

Where do you write the std::getline and std::string?

Do you declare it or is it function?

Could you write it out that's involved with my code?

[GDog63]

Alright, I hope one of you guys are still reading this because I just tested out my program again to debug and IT WORKS.

I didn't try the strtoul or std::getline that was mentioned above. But here's the remaining code. The only thing I change was the age, statement for else. Could someone explain how terminating the else statement before it writes out was fixed?

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
char age;

cout<<"Please input your age: ";
cin>> age;
if ( age < 100 ) {
cout<<"You are fairly young.\n";
return 0;
}
else (!age); {
cout<<"That's a letter! ";
cin.ignore();
return 0;
}
}

[firedraco]

You need to check !cin, not !age, and that ';' isn't supposed to be there (otherwise that section of code will always run).