looping through a char. seq. array of unknown length

[psychohagos]

I have the following basic code to retrieve a word from the user:

    char word [20];
    char question [] = "Please enter a word (less than 20 characters long)"
    
    cout << question;
    cin >> word;

I then want to loop through the array and check each char against something else but i am unsure of how to do this as the user could enter a any word of any length.

[jonnin]

in general, this is C style and you should use c++ strings unless you have a reason not to.

However, they still work, so here goes:
the zero (0) char will be placed after the normal chars in the string to mark the end of string. The function strlen(char *) will return this for you, but you don't need it as you can just check for the zero yourself. There are a bunch of other char array routines, all are found in the <cstring> header or on a C compiler, <string.h>

[Peter_APIIT]

You can used string data type and the at() function where this function will check for out bound.

I hope this help.

[Danny]

Best to read the user input into a string object instead of a fixed sized array:

std::string inp;
cout<"enter data: ";
cin>>str;

Then use str.size() to tell how many characters there are in the string and check each character with a loop.

[psychohagos]

ok. but how then do i loop through characters in a string?

[psychohagos]

Essentially I want to take two strings, compare them to see if they share any letters.

[jonnin]

did you even read my post?

[psychohagos]

yh, but that just confused me more. I dont understand what you mean.

[jonnin]

C strings end in zero automatically. If you treat char like an int, when it is == zero, you are done (you have read all the valid chars in your string).

[psychohagos]

ok but I have had to change to using strings now anyway.

Do you know how to loop through strings?

[Danny]

This should give you a clue:
for (int i=0; i<str.size(); i++)
{
cout<<str[i]<endl;
}