Input validation in C++

Inputs have to be validated before allowing any kind of processing or operations to be performed on it. This is extremely important because, an unhandled wrong input might have the complete ability to crash a system.  C++ has some good  validation techniques that can be used to validate most kind of inputs. This post discusses some of the techniques and its shortcomings and what could be done to improve the quality of validation.

Now, consider a program has to accept only integer inputs and reject all the others. So, the developer would have declared to store the integer value in say “int a;”. So “a” will store the input value.

When the user input is accepted using the “cin>>a” statement, we can use the inbuilt methods surrounding the “cin”  statement to test its status.

Here is a sample program: –

</p>
#include
#include using namespace std;

int main()
{
int a;
<p style="text-align: left;"> cout<<"Enter an integer number\n"; cin>>a;
while(1)
{
if(cin.fail())
{
cin.clear();
cin.ignore(numeric_limits::max(),'\n');
cout<<"You have entered wrong input"<<endl; cin>>a;
}
if(!cin.fail())
break;
}</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">cout<<"the number is: "<<a<<endl;
return 0;
}</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">

From the above example, the various functions are used to validate the input like the cin.fail(), cin.ignore(), etc. The various functions of these methods are :

function

Description

cin.fail() This function returns true when an input failure occurs. In this case it would be an input that is not an integer. If the cin fails then the input buffer is kept in an error state.
cin.clear() This is used to clear the error state of the buffer so that further processing of input can take place. This ensures that the input does not lead to an infinite loop of error message display.
cin.ignore() This function is used to ignore the rest of the line after the first instance of error that has occurred and it skips to or moves to the next line.
cin.eof() This function can be used to check end of file errors. This returns 1  if the program tried reading something but , it was from the end of the file.

Here is a screenshot of the various wrong inputs given, and them being handled by the program till a correct  input is provided.

 imput valid

Though this technique seems to work fine it hides a dangerous fault that can occur. This can be considered as a dis advantage of using c++. This technique does not catch certain types of input.
The following screenshots show 2 inputs that is accepted and the numerical part is printed.

invalid1

invalid2

 So, how can this erroneous inputs be handled?
The technique we can apply is to accept the input as a string. The analyze the string to be of the illegal types shown above using regular expressions. If the input is valid then convert it into an integer and use it in the program else display an error message.
Though its possible, its very difficult to be achieved in c++. This is mainly because,  c++ doesn’t support regular expressions by default, we have to make use of the regex library which is quite complex to use.
So to conclude, though C++ provides some handy tools to validate inputs, it does not help us to cover all possible situations in a straight forward way, which would lead us to use other workarounds to get our job done. But the validation of input can be handled in an efficient way with languages like java and c#.

Update 1:  29th Sept 2015

Blog Reader @Nick has provided a solution that is free from reg-ex, and i encourage you to try this out as well and let me know how it works in the comments:

A solution to the problem regex expression free


#include
#include
#include

int main()
{
std::string line;
int num;
//split onto multiple lines for readability
while((std::cout <> num) && !(is >> line)) //re-using `line` to test for extra stuff after the number
{
break; //done, we got what we wanted
}
std::cerr << "Invalid input, try again." << std::endl;
}
}

akshay pai

I am a data science engineer and I love working on machine learning problems. I have experience in computer vision, OCR and NLP. I love writing and sharing my knowledge with others. This is why I created Source Dexter. Here I write about Python, Machine Learning, and Raspberry Pi the most. I also write about technology in general, books and topics related to science. I am also a freelance writer with over 3 years of writing high-quality, SEO optimized content for the web. I have written for startups, websites, and universities all across the globe. Get in Touch! We can discuss more.

11 thoughts on “Input validation in C++

  • April 7, 2015 at 4:20 pm
    Permalink

    How to restrict user to enter fixed number in variable???example: If i want only 3 digits in int a. than user can not enter 4th digits and throw an error and system will be stopped.

    Reply
    • April 7, 2015 at 8:47 pm
      Permalink

      In that case you could provide a condition restricting the values to be less that 999, and if the condition doesn’t satisfy, throw an error.

      Another method would be to use regular expression to match and see of the entered number matches the format of 3 digits, for example the regular expression could be [0-9][0-9][0-9]

      Reply
    • August 1, 2015 at 2:21 am
      Permalink

      When working with user input, despite the sentiment of this blog entry, you really should strive to be robust. Fortunately, the c++11 regex header makes this much less painful than it’s been in the past.

      #include
      #include
      #include
      #include

      const std::regex integerPattern_3digit(“(\+|-)?[[:d:]]{0,3}”);
      std::string staging;

      std::cin >> staging;
      if (!(std::match(staging, integerPattern_3digit)) throw std::exception();
      // conventional wisdom is throwing for user input error is a bad practice

      Reply
      • August 1, 2015 at 2:23 am
        Permalink

        Annoyingly, word press captures the header declarations as html.

        The headers used are
        string
        iostream
        regex
        exception

        Reply
      • August 5, 2015 at 2:01 pm
        Permalink

        I hadn’t known this, thanks for it. Will update my post with your suggestion soon.

        Reply
  • Pingback:Validated user input in C++ #TC1017 #Mastery 27

  • September 28, 2015 at 7:22 pm
    Permalink

    A solution to the problem regex expression free

    #include
    #include
    #include

    int main()
    {
    std::string line;
    int num;
    //split onto multiple lines for readability
    while((std::cout <> num) && !(is >> line)) //re-using `line` to test for extra stuff after the number
    {
    break; //done, we got what we wanted
    }
    std::cerr << "Invalid input, try again." << std::endl;
    }
    }

    Reply
  • January 22, 2017 at 2:28 am
    Permalink

    I disagree with a few of the premises, but thank you for the article.

    There are some reasons not to use regex, but in modern C++, I think it’s hard to argue that “complexity” is one of them for validating a 3-digit number.

    @apmccartney’s implementation using regex and modern C++ is the one I would recommend to your readers. If modern C++ is not a possibility, Boost has a regex library compatible with C++98/03.

    Also, the code you highlighted (from @Nick) does not compile. See here: http://ideone.com/rT5ZgL

    My experience is that by the time you have built an airtight parser without using regex (including all the time for false positives where we think we’re done, only to find out down the road that we missed a scenario), we find we would have been much better off having bitten the bullet to learn regex.

    That being said, regex can be computationally intensive and isn’t a one fit-solution for everything. But in this case, I do think it’s the right tool for the job.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: