# IO

## Transcript

Welcome to competitive programming!

## Input and Output

Today we are going to talk about IO, and some of the tricks you will need. There are three common patterns for test cases you will want to know, and some different kinds of formatting you’ll need.

## Explicit Test Count

The most common scenario is that the first line of input will contain the number of test cases you should expect. This is the easiest thing to handle. Just make sure you decrement your variable that counts how many cases there are!

You can also say while (cases) without the explicit check for zero, but the explicit check is slightly safer.

The code on the right uses cin and cout. The include file at the top brings in the entire standard template library, and is a lot more convenient than having to list the different STL data structures separately. The ios_base and tie stuff you see on lines 3 and 4 are for efficiency, and I’ll talk about them later.

## Termination Marker

The second common pattern is to have a termination marker. For example, you could be reading in a bunch of points, and when it is done there will be a special value such as -1 to indicate that you are done. That is what this code is doing here; when x and y both get -1, we are done.

There are two common ways to deal with this kind of input. One technique is to make a non-terminating while loop and use a break statement to exit if the termination marker is detected. Be careful using this if you happen to have nested loops for some reason.

## Termination Marker, pt 2

I think it is more reliable though to put the check in the while loop itself. Here’s an example using scanf, but you can do this with cin also. I happen to think this code is cleaner; a bug involving break statements can be harder to track down than one involving an exit condition.

During a contest, though, nobody is going to care how readable your code is, except for you.

## End of File

The final common method is to have an end of file. You have to be careful with this; if you don’t check, the code will keep running with weird values in your input variables. scanf will return an explicit EOF marker if you hit the end of file, and cin.eof() will return true upon end of file.

## Why scanf and printf?

If you are not using C++ you can skip this bit.

You will sometimes hear people tell you not to use cin and cout, since they can be inefficient. There are some problems that if you use off-the-shelf cout to output your answer it can get Time Limit Exceeded. This is rare, but can happen if your code needs to output a lot of data. In that case, these two lines will speed things up. The sync_with_stdio allows you to mix printf and cout style output without causing trouble. C style printf and C++ style cout have their own buffers. If you are only using cout, you don’t need to synchronize the buffers, so you can use this call to turn that off. If you using both, then don’t type this line or your output will be randomly shuffled, depending on when the buffers get flushed.

The second line causes cin and cout to be tied together. For example, if you use cout to write a prompt to the string, then cin to read the input, you want the prompt to be flushed and displayed before trying to collect the input. For most contest situations, you don’t need this.

Finally, endl always flushes the output, so use \n instead.

That said, scanf and printf have some nice features you may want to use, but you have to be more careful. For example, the format string has to indicate the type of thing you are dealing with, and scanf also has to be given a reference to the variable. This is because it is using old C-style programming.

## Spaces and such

Here are some examples of where scanf can save some time. Suppose you know the input is going to have something like parens and a comma around two integers. With scanf you can read in those expected characters and extract out the integers. On the bottom you see this other notation, something kind of like regular expression matching. I have to admit, I don’t think I have ever seen this used in real life.

## Getting the whole line.

Sometimes you will need to get a whole line. Here’s how to do it. If you are using C-style input, you’ll want to use fgets. Here, name is your string variable, and 100 is the maximum size. For C++ style, use getline. The first getline reads a whole line, the second one throws out leading whitespace first.

## Setting number of digits

Some problems will specify how many digits to display. For printf, there are modifiers to the codes that change if there should be leading spaces or zeros or not. There are similar modifiers that work with floating point. You will want to look up the printf documentation and get familiar with these.

For cout, there are also function modifiers like width and set_precision you can use. I find them to be a lot more verbose than the printf style formatting.

## Interactive Tests

Finally, you need to know about interactive tests. At the time of writing, ICPC has not used these in a world finals, but during the practice contest for the 2019 world finals in Portugal there was one interactive problem. This means they are testing them out and seriously considering having them in the future.

These are not really more difficult, but if you get one then you have to disregard everything said earlier about tieing cin with cout. In this case you want to flush the buffers regularly or else you program might hang waiting for input because the output buffer didn’t get flushed yet.

Well, that is the basics of what you need to know. See you in class.