CSCI 261 - Programming Concepts

Make a copy of Lab3A's main.cpp and place it as the starting point for Lab7A.

At the end of Lab3A, we had a fully functioning rock-paper-scissors game that allowed the user to play multiple games. Now we want to modify our program to create a log of every game played.

The focus of this lab is on one concept: how to write data to an "output file stream" or ofstream object.

Today's class discussed how data is often treated as "streams" of information that can be written a piece at a time. The files we will write in CSCI 261 are simple text files; for lab today, the simple text file will contain a series of characters. Remember that whenever you work with a file stream as output, we call them ofstream objects.

There will always be four things you will do whenever working with an ofstream . Open the file, check for an error, write its data, and close the file. The typical pattern for this is as follows:

Remember, once you have an ofstream object (like myCatsAges shown above) you use it in a manner similar to using cout .

For this lab, start with your solution to Lab3A. We want to write out a log of all of the user's input. What choice they entered and what time this occurred.

This log will be created by writing to a file in the following format:

From this log, we could go back and study a user's behavior. How long it takes them to complete steps, what order they make decisions.

You should modify your Lab3A program by first opening a file to write out to. Then everytime the user enters a choice, write to the file the current time and the game result following the format above. Do not worry about formatting the time to appear in a pretty format like hh:mm. The output of the time() function is sufficient.

After you run your program, you may wonder "hmm, where did the file I just wrote to go?". Well, if you expand the cmake-build-debug folder, then you will see the file you created. This is ok, but not our preferred location. We would much rather have the resulting file be placed at the same level as our main.cpp.

To do so, we need to tell CLion where we would like files placed. This can be found from going to Run > Edit Configurations. In the pop up window that appears, we want to set the "Working Directory" to be the path to the folder that our main.cpp file is located in. Hit Apply and OK, then rerun the program. You will now see the file created next to main.cpp.