C++ Primer Plus

How cin >> Views Input

The various versions of the extraction operator share a common way of looking at the input stream. They skip over white space (blanks, newlines, and tabs) until they encounter a non-white-space character. This is true even for the single-character modes (those in which the argument is type char, unsigned char, or signed char), which is not true of C’s character input functions (see Figure 17.5). In the single-character modes, the >> operator reads that character and assigns it to the indicated location. In the other modes, the operator reads in one unit of the indicated type. That is, it reads everything from the initial non-white-space character up to the first character that doesn’t match the destination type.

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