(warning) multi-character character constant

[SoftBotter]

Hi,

I'm writing my first programme, and I don't understand this error. I've looked up some information about it, but I can't seem to understand it.

Here's my code:

// reading a text file
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
#include <windows.h>
using namespace std;

int main () {
  string line;
  string word;
  ifstream myfile ("example.txt");
  if (myfile.is_open())
  {
    while ( myfile.good() )
    { 
      cin.ignore(256, '\n');
      getline (myfile,line);
      for ( int i = 0 ; i < line.length(); i++)
          if ( line[i] == ': :' )
             '/n'
      cout << line << endl;
      cin.get();
    }
    myfile.close();
  }

  else cout << "Unable to open file"; 

  return 0;
}

The error currently occurs at cout << line << endl;

I would like to understand the error itself and how it applies to my code.

Any assistance would be appreciated

[anonymous23323124]

if ( line[i] == ': :' )

I think the problem is here. ': :' is a character constant as it is contained in single inverted commas. However, you have put three characters inside it. A character constant must contain one character only.

'/n'
What is this for? It doesn't seem to do anything and the semicolon is missing. (Also, is this supposed to be an escaped newline character '\n'?)

[SoftBotter]

Hi there,

Thank you for the reply.

I put the semicolon after '/n' and changed '/n' to '\n' and no longer receive the error.

However, my programme still isn't doing what it's supposed to.

The programme is intended to read a txt file (example.txt). The file contains extremely long lines of text. Where a new line should be, the text file contains the characters : :

The programme should be finding those : : instances and creating a new line in the output instead.

Although I get no errors now, the programme does not create a new line instead of the : :. It merely outputs the whole long line.

[anonymous23323124]

Firstly, I don't think line[i] == ': :' does what you are expecting.

The single quote marks are for characters, and you are checking a single character of your string for three characters. Clearly this doesn't make sense ;)

Instead you need to compare three characters of your line variable to the string literal ": :".

If you want more advice on how to do this, I might be able to help. But perhaps you should read some of this first:
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/string/

As for replacing the ": :" with a newline character, you may need to rethink your method for that too. Just writing a line '\n'; does absolutely nothing :(