| Thinking in C++ Vol 2 - Practical Programming |
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The class ios contains data members to store all the
formatting information pertaining to a stream. Some of this data has a range of
values and is stored in variables: the floating-point precision, the output
field width, and the character used to pad the output (normally a space). The
rest of the formatting is determined by flags, which are usually combined to
save space and are referred to collectively as the format flags. You can
find out the value of the format flags with the ios::flags( ) member function, which takes no arguments and returns an object of type fmtflags (usually a synonym for long) that contains the current format flags. All the
rest of the functions make changes to the format flags and return the previous
value of the format flags.
fmtflags ios::flags(fmtflags newflags);
fmtflags ios::setf(fmtflags ored_flag);
fmtflags ios::unsetf(fmtflags
clear_flag);
fmtflags ios::setf(fmtflags bits, fmtflags field);
The first function forces all the flags to change,
which is sometimes what you want. More often, you change one flag at a time
using the remaining three functions.
The use of setf( ) can seem somewhat confusing.
To know which overloaded version to use, you must know what type of flag you re
changing. There are two types of flags: those that are simply on or off, and
those that work in a group with other flags. The on/off flags are the simplest
to understand because you turn them on with setf(fmtflags) and off with unsetf(fmtflags).
These flags are shown in the following table:
|
on/off flag
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Effect
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ios::skipws
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Skip white space. (For input; this is the default.)
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ios::showbase
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Indicate the numeric base (as set, for example, by dec, oct, or hex) when printing an integral value. Input streams
also recognize the base prefix when showbase is on.
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ios::showpoint
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Show decimal point and trailing zeros for floating-point
values.
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ios::uppercase
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Display uppercase A-F for hexadecimal values and E
for scientific values.
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ios::showpos
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Show plus sign (+) for positive values.
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ios::unitbuf
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Unit buffering. The stream is flushed after each
insertion.
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For example, to show the plus sign for cout, you say cout.setf(ios::showpos). To stop showing the plus sign, you say cout.unsetf(ios::showpos).
The unitbuf flag controls unit buffering, which means that each insertion is flushed to its output stream immediately. This
is handy for error tracing, so that in case of a program crash, your data is
still written to the log file. The following program illustrates unit
buffering:
//: C04:Unitbuf.cpp {RunByHand}
#include <cstdlib> // For abort()
#include <fstream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
ofstream out("log.txt");
out.setf(ios::unitbuf);
out << "one" << endl;
out << "two" << endl;
abort();
} ///:~
It is necessary to turn on unit buffering before any
insertions are made to the stream. When we commented out the call to setf( ),
one particular compiler had written only the letter o to the file log.txt.
With unit buffering, no data was lost.
The standard error output stream cerr has unit
buffering turned on by default. There is a cost for unit buffering, so if an
output stream is heavily used, don t enable unit buffering unless efficiency is
not a consideration.
| Thinking in C++ Vol 2 - Practical Programming |
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