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Weeaboo420
Weeaboo420

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C++ stuck inside while-loop?

I am trying to learn C++ and so far it has been fairly straightforward. I have been following a course on YouTube and I'm about halfway through.

So I decided that I wanted to make a BMI calculator, simple enough right? I decided I wanted to use while loops when reading different values from the user and it works for the most part. The problem comes when the user enters something other than a number, the program gets stuck inside an if-statement and doesn't seem to be able to break out and I don't know how to handle it.

In a language like Python or even C#, while-loops work as I expect them to but in c++ they seem to be somewhat different or maybe there is something strange with using cin, I am still pretty new c++.

Here's my code:

#include <iostream>
#include <conio.h>

using namespace std;


int main()
{
    //Keep track of the data we need and the
    //data we want to calculate later
    float bmi = 0;
    float weight = 0;
    float height = 0;

    //Keep track of which while loop we should
    //be inside.
    //0 = weight loop,
    //1 = height loop
    int loopCount = 0;


    while(loopCount == 0)
    {   
        cout << "Enter your weight in kgs: ";
        cin >> weight;

        if(weight <= 0)
        {
            cout << loopCount << " ERROR: Please enter a valid weight in kgs" << endl;
        }

        else
        {
            loopCount = 1;
        }         
    }


    while(loopCount == 1)
    {    
        cout << endl;
        cout << "Press any key to continue...";
        getch();

        return 0;
    }

    return 0;

}

To clarify, when a user inputs a number everything works fine. When the user doesn't input a number the program freaks out and it gets stuck printing the error message over and over again. I tried using cin.fail() but that produced the same results so I am really clueless here.

Top comments (2)

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bhupesh profile image
Bhupesh Varshney 👾 • Edited

Does this work ?

cout << "Enter your weight in kgs: " << flush;
if (!(cin >> weight)) {
    cout << "You did not enter a correct number!" << endl;
    // Leave the program, or do something appropriate:
}

Also make sure to add the #help tag to reach more visibility

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nanarayanan profile image
nanarayanan

Based on en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/io/basic...

Your program needs to clear the failure and skip the bad input.
cin.clear(); // unset failbit
cin.ignore(std::numeric_limitsstd::streamsize::max(), '\n'); // skip bad input

Your program needs to include limits (#include ) too.

I would suggest you pls go through further details given in the link above.