thanks to the amazing chervil this code works but now i need to understand why

[devonrevenge]

so i couldnt get getline to work, i didnt realise i needed to put myfile << line; in after writing getline (cin,line);

why is cin in the parenthesis and how does it (getline()) work, also am i right in thinkong i can use .c_string to pop any string reference into anything so i could do say cout << something.c_string () ; (not that i would bother with cout)



#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

main ()
{

string line;
string filename;


cout << "enter file name\n";
cin >> filename;
cin >> line;
ofstream myfile;
myfile.open (filename.c_str());


getline(cin,line);
myfile << line;




system ("pause");
return 0;
}

[Chervil]

why is cin in the parenthesis and how does it (getline()) work, also am i right in thinkong i can use .c_string to pop any string reference into anything so i could do say cout << something.c_string () ; (not that i would bother with cout)

This is the reference for getline: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/getline/

As for .c_string(), I think you mean .c_str().
take a look at the reference http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/string/c_str/

You use it when a plain c-string is needed (just a null-terminated array of characters) instead of the more advanced C++ string.

[devonrevenge]

thank you chervil ^_^

[Stewbond]

To simplify things a little bit, you don't actually need .c_str(). You can also combine

ofstream myfile; 
myfile.open(filename);

into one line;

#include <iostream> // std::cin, std::cout
#include <string>   // std::string, std::getline
#include <fstream>  // std::ofstream
using namespace std;

int main ()
{
  string line, filename;

  cout << "enter file name: ";
  getline(cin,filename);

  cout << "enter line: ";
  getline(cin,line);

  ofstream myfile(filename);
  myfile << line;

  return 0;
}

Getline works by taking whatever is in the first argument (a stream such as an ifstream, istringstream or istream) and sticking it in the second argument (a string).