How to move cursor to end of text output after cin.clear() and cin.ignore()?

Question

After clearing invalid input with std::cin.clear() and std::cin.ignore(), the cursor moves to the beginning of the next line printed by std::cout. I experimented with including an extra std::endl in various positions, to no avail.

Is there any way to force the cursor to the end of the line?

Prompt

  do {

    std::cout << "Enter a number: ";

    if(!(std::cin >> number)) {
      std::cout << "Not a number. Try again..."<< std::endl;
      std::cin.clear();
      std::cin.ignore(10000, '\n');
    }

  } while (number != -1);

Output

Enter a number: |
Invalid input. Try again...
|Enter a number:

'|' represents the cursor position

UKMonkey UKMonkey · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-15T02:11:32

std::cout isn't always what you think it is. It's not "the output to the terminal" - it could be output to a file, or even printer. Moving the cursor around on a printer wouldn't do what you might want it to do.

As such, you could TRY printing backspace characters (\b) and see what happens, but better yet would be to obtain a terminal library - like ncurses; which will give you far better control of the cursor.

How to move cursor to end of text output after cin.clear() and cin.ignore()?

1 Answers