Preferred way of accepting a string from the standard input is via the std::getline function which takes std::cin and our string as parameters:
#include <iostream> #include <string> int main() /*w w w . j a v a2 s .com*/ { std::string s; std::cout << "Please enter a string: "; std::getline(std::cin, s); std::cout << "You entered: " << s; }
We use the std::getline because our string can contain white spaces.
If we used the std::cin function alone, it would accept only a part of the string.
The std::getline function has the following signature:
std::getline(read_from, into);
The function reads a line of text from the standard input into a string variable.
To use the std::string type, include the <string> header explicitly.