Trying to pick out all of the "-" signs in a string.

[sepetoner]

I am letting the user input a sentence(telling them to put in - signs). I want the program to count how many the user puts in. For some reason, the program keeps saying 0(no matter how many "-" I put in the sentence. What am I doing wrong?

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
    char sent[100];

    cout << "Enter a sentence with a lot of '-' in it: ";
    cin >> sent[100];
    char minussign = '-';
    int count = 0;

    for (int i=0; i<100;i++)
       {
        if (sent[i] == minussign)
            count++;
       }

    cout << count;

    return 0;
}

[gelatine]

try changing this char minussign = '-'; into this: char minussign = 45; (ASCII characters)

[Hippogriff]

Your mistake is at
cin >> sent[100];

That means you are putting whatever the user enters, into the 100th element in the array (which is a really bad idea in this case, as sent stops at 99).

Change it to cin >> sent to have the input entered into the entire array instead and it should work correctly.

[sepetoner]

Hmm. It still returns 0. Any other ideas?

Also, when do you know to use the ASCII characters vs using what I did?

[gelatine]

well i remembered me using ascii characters for something like this but as james already said the solution is changing it to cin >> sent; instead of cin >> sent[100];. code works with either'-' or 45 it doesn't matter

[sepetoner]

James, I thought that would work! But it still returns 0...

[fg109]

You should use getline.
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/getline/

Otherwise, you will only catch the first word.

[sepetoner]

I just tried that, but it is giving me an error

 no matching function for call to 'getline(std::istream&, char&)'

after I put in getline (cin, sent);

I think maybe because it is not a string?

[Hippogriff]

You should use cin's version of getline in this case, if you don't want to use strings.

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostream/istream/getline/
cin.getline(sent, 100);

[sepetoner]

Ahhh that worked! Thank you! I didn't know that that existed.

So any time I want to loop through each character of string, I must use getline?

[fg109]

Every time you want to catch more than one word, you must use getline.