I have looked up the definition of the function flush in C++, and I got some really satisfactory answers, but I recently came across the following code, and I can't seem to understand if the use of flush is making much of a difference here, it seems that the code is giving a valid output even without the use of flush. Please help out!
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
class person {
public:
int ph_no;
char name[50];
void accept() {
cout<<"\nEnter name";
cin>>name;
cout<<"\nenter ph_no";
cin>>ph_no;
}
void display() {
cout<<"name:"<<name<<"\n";
cout<<"phone_no:"<<ph_no<<"\n" ;
}
};
int main() {
// a few other functions to create file and read file &c &c.
person p;
int pno,pos,choice,offset,i;
fstream fp;
char name[20];
cout<<"\n enter name";
cin>>name;
fp.open("d:\\test.dat",ios::out|ios::in|ios::ate|ios::binary);
fp.seekg(0,ios::beg);
pos=-1;
i=0;
while(fp.read((char *)&p,sizeof(p))) {
if((strcmp(name,p.name))==0) {
pos=i;
break;
}
i++;
}
offset=pos*sizeof(p);
fp.seekp(offset);
cout<<"\ncurrent phno:"<<p.ph_no;
cout<<"\nenter new phone no";
cin>>pno;
p.ph_no=pno;
fp.write((char *)&p,sizeof(p))<<flush;
cout<<"\nrecord updated\n";
fp.seekg(0);
while(fp.read((char *)&p,sizeof(p))) {
p.display();
}
fp.close();
return 0;
}
The std::cout
and std::cin
are tied
The tied stream is an output stream object which is flushed before each i/o operation in
this
stream object.By default, the standard narrow streams
cin
andcerr
are tied to cout, and their wide character counterparts (wcin
andwcerr
) towcout
. Library implementations may also tieclog
andwclog
.
As for the:
fp.write((char *)&p,sizeof(p))<<flush;
cout<<"\nrecord updated\n";
fp.seekg(0);
// the next read will return the correct info even without the
// prev flush because:
// - either the seekg will force the flushing, if the seek-ed
// position is outside the buffer range; *or*
// - the seekg pos is still inside the buffer, thus no
// I/O activity will be necessary to retrieve that info
while(fp.read((char *)&p,sizeof(p)))