Programming Fundamentals

Lecture 4
 Objectives
• To know about manipulators
• setw() and setfill() manipulator
• To know about Data type conversions
• To know about casts
• Cascading of << and >> operators

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 2
Mohsin
 Review Problem 1
• What will be the output of following piece of code?

Done in Class, Have a

look at your lecture notes

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 3
Mohsin
 Review Problem 2
• Write a code in C++ which will ask the user to enter
his/her age in days and then show the age in Years,
Months and Days.
• For simplicity you may suppose that there are 30 days
in each month

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 4
Mohsin
 Manipulators
• Manipulators are instructions to the output
stream that modify the output in various ways
• The commonly used manipulators are endl,
setw() and setfill()
• endl
– endl manipulator terminates the line
• setw()
– setw() manipulator changes the field width of output
• setfill()
– setfill() manipulator fills the empty spaces of output
with a specific character
Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris
CS214 - PF 5
Mohsin
 setw() Manipulator
• setw() manipulator accept an integer argument
and display the text in that specified length
• We can change the alignment of the text to left or
right
• The default alignment is right
• We need to add the header file named iomanip
to use setw() manipulator
• Have a look at the example for more details of
setw() manipulator

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 6
Mohsin
 setfill() Manipulator
• setfill() manipulator accept a character as an
argument and fills the blank spaces with that
particular character
• For example the following line
cout<<setfill(‘.’)<<left<<setw(10)<<“Name”<<endl;
• Will print the following
Name……

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 7
Mohsin
 Practice Problem
• Print the following message on screen
Name Age Savings
Ali 18 500
Usman 15 500
Sharjeel 22 1500

• Modify your code to fill the empty spaces with

dashes (-)
• Solution is on next slide

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 8
Mohsin
 Practice Problem (Solution)

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 9
Mohsin
 Type Conversions
• Unlike many other programming languages C++
allows the expressions containing mixed data
types
• When we add several data types in a single
expression, the C++ compiler converts the data
types to a common one, and this process is called
type conversion
• The type conversions may happen in two
different ways
– Automatic conversions
– Conversions through casts

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 10
Mohsin
 Automatic Data Type Conversions
• When we mix two or more different data types in an
expression the data type with the lowest order is
converted into the data type of highest order (this is
called implicit conversion)
• Automatic conversions only work for built-in data types

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 11
Mohsin
 Casts in C++
• Implicit conversions are automatically performed
when a value is copied to a compatible type
• If we want to copy the value to a non-compatible
type then we convert its type by using casts
• There are several casts in C++ like
– Static cast
– Dynamic cast
– Reinterpret cast
– Constant cast
• For the time being we will focus only on static
cast
Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris
CS214 - PF 12
Mohsin
 Static Cast
• In C++ type conversion, the static_cast
operator performs an explicit type conversion
• All types of conversions that are well-defined and
allowed by the compiler are performed using
static_cast
• The static_cast operator can be used for
operations such as:
– Converting a pointer of a base class to a pointer of a
nonvirtual derived class
– Converting numeric data types such as int to float or
float to double

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 13
Mohsin
 Syntax of Static_Cast
• The syntax of using static_cast is
static_cast<new_type>(expression)
• For example the following expression will convert the
int x to a character, and assign the converted value to a
character
int x = 65; char a;
a = static_cast<char>(x);

• The traditional type-casting equivalents to above

expressions would be:
(new_type) expression; // a = (char)x;
new_type(expression); // a = char(x);

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 14
Mohsin
 Benefits of Static_Cast
• There are several advantages of using
static_cast and its syntax
– We can convert between non-built-in data types
– The implicit conversions are hard to see and hard
to search, so it is too difficult to find the possible
errors due to type conversions
– By using new syntax we make sure that we are
deliberately changing the data type and it is not a
logical error

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 15
Mohsin
 Practice Problem
• Write a code which should ask the user to
enter a character and display its equivalent
ASCII code

Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris

CS214 - PF 16
Mohsin
 Cascading in cout and cin
• We have already seen that we can cascade the stream
operator << in any C++ program, like
int a = 10, b = 20, c = 30;
cout<<a<<‘\t’<<b<<‘\t’<<c<<endl;

• Similarly we can cascade the >> operator as well

• The cascaded >> operator works for mixed data types,
or we introduce dummy characters to such mixing
• The benefit of cascading >> operator is, there will be
no need to press the Enter key after typing every input
• Have a look at the example for more clear
understanding
Course Instructor : Muhammad Haris
CS214 - PF 17
Mohsin