   cout and cin
  Hi guys,   I've taken many steps back in my programming agenda and have gone back to basic console in/out stuff in C++. What I am trying to design is a simple array that each cell corresponds to a different position on a map. When you enter that cell, it will display the description of that cell to you.   For example, lets say your avatar is standing at location 1, 4. Here, it would display something like: You find yourself standing in a lush, green forest. You hear the sound of running water to the East. Dense foliage and trees block your way to the West and you can see the Misted Mountains to the North.   Then, you'd be prompted to enter a word or phrase. Look North, Look East, etc...   Then, it might update your stats and display them? Anyway, I'm getting off topic. My question is, would cin and cout be acceptable to do this in? Or do I need to write my own input/output library? Conceptually, this sounds easy to me, and maybe I'm just making it overly difficult because I have it drilled in my mind that C++ is a difficult language.I'll check back often and any help would be great!MMcNeil   
  cin and cout would work fine for what you described.you could just have an array off strings:std::string array[5][5];std::string response;array[1][2] = "mountains to the east";std::cout << array[1][2];std::cin >> response;however, everything you print out will just keep accumulating in the console.  If you want to be able to erase the console, you would use the ncurses library on linux.  There is probably a similar library for windows.   ;  Agreed. Just a heads up to save some wailing and gnashing of teeth:If you use std::cin >> response; as above, it will only read the first word up to any whitespace into the string. If you want to get a whole line of input into one string before you process it, I believe you needstd::getline(cin,response);HTH Paul[EDIT] Windows equivalents to ncurses is conio.h for Borland's compilers. Not sure about Microsoft. If you need to do a lot of customised console work, I cannot recommend enough downloading the free digital mars C++ from www.digitalmars.com and having a look at disp.h. If you need to do any clever keyboard reading under Win32 though, you will need to look into the Win32 API. There is normally a getch() function in conio.h or equivalent but that won't detect shift keys and (with the digital mars compiler) won't even respond to arrow keys or delete etc.   