Why do I get a number when I stream the result of tolower() to std::cout, but not when I use putchar()?

Question

I was trying to write a program which will convert every word(either upper or lower case) in the upper or lower case(depending on which case is max).So here is my program

#include<iostream>
#include<cstring>
#include<cctype>
#include<cstdio>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
    char s[101];
    int c=0, sm=0, i;

    cin>>s;

    for(i=0;i<strlen(s);i++)
    {
        if(s[i]>='A' && s[i]<='Z')
            c++;
        else
            sm++;
    }

    if(sm>c)
    {
        for(i=0;i<strlen(s);i++)
        {
            //cout<<tolower(s[i])<<endl;
            putchar(tolower(s[i]));
        }
    }
    else
    {
        for(i=0;i<strlen(s);i++)
        {
            //cout<<toupper(s[i])<<endl;
            putchar(toupper(s[i]));
        }
    }
}

But i was surprised to see that if i write these statement

if(sm>c)
    {
        for(i=0;i<strlen(s);i++)
        {
            cout<<tolower(s[i])<<endl;                
        }
    }

or

else
    {
        for(i=0;i<strlen(s);i++)
        {
            //cout<<toupper(s[i])<<endl;
            putchar(toupper(s[i]));
        }
    }

then it seems that output is in ASCII number.Can anyone explain me these reason.I am new to c++, so not much aware of cout

Answer 1

std::tolower() and std::toupper() functions return value is int. And std::cout print the exact value that appears to it.

So cout<< tolower(s[i])<<endl print ASCII value of the characters. But when you write putchar(toupper(s[i])) then putchar() function automatically converts the ASCII value to characters. That's why you get character as output.

In order to use cout<< tolower(s[i]) << endl you need to typecast the ASCII value to character.

So write -

cout<< (char)(toupper[i]) <<endl;
cout<< (char)(tolower[i]) <<endl;