Help with a small class program?

[Shinisama]

Hello,

So I am new here, from what I have seen people here know what they're doing (not that my question is hard at all). So I am taking a programming class at my school. I have dabbled around with programming for a while, but never got very far. My teacher has given us some very simple programs to write, but I am a bit confused with this one. Here are the instructions to the assignment:

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Write a C++ program that does the following:

Prompt the user to enter a day of the week as M (or m), T, W, R, F, S, and U for Monday through Sunday respectively. The user may enter an upper or lower case letter.

When the user enters a character, the program will echo the letter and output the name of the day of the week.

Provide an error trap that reads something like "you have entered an invalid letter; program aborting." Suggestion: use a switch statement with the error trap as the default condition. it is not necessary to prompt for multiple inputs.

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So I know how to get the program to echo back the letter and everything. What I am a little confused about is: will I have to define all the letters as their respective day? eg. make M== Monday. And if I do have to do that how would I get it to accept Upper and Lower case letters and recognize that that letter is == monday ect. ect.

Also my main problem is the switch statement as the error trap. I have never used the switch statement, but I know what they do. I just don't really understand how I would use it for an error trap. Am I suppose to just make a case for every other letter in the alphabet other then M T W R F S and U? Even if I do that then what if the user enters a number instead of a letter?

I am sorry if I am not making much sense... It makes sense in my head, hopefully its not too jumbled..

Thanks for the help guys!

[laserlight]

Am I suppose to just make a case for every other letter in the alphabet other then M T W R F S and U?

No. Recall that a switch has an optional default case.

Even if I do that then what if the user enters a number instead of a letter?

If you are reading a character and ignorning whatever comes after that character, then if a number is entered, the character read won't be one of the valid inputs.

[Shinisama]

Alright, after a little bit more research I figured it out (at least I thought.) This is what I came up with:
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main ()
{
int day;
cout << "Enter a letter that represents a day of the week: " << endl;
cin >> day;
cout << "The letter you entered is ." << day << endl;

switch (day)
{
case 'm':
case 'M':
cout << "The day of the week is Monday." << endl;
break;
case 't':
case 'T':
cout << "The day of the week is Tuesday." << endl;
break;
case 'w':
case 'W':
cout << "The day of the week is Wednesday." << endl;
break;
case 'r':
case 'R':
cout << "The day of the week is Thursday." << endl;
break;
case 'f':
case 'F':
cout << "The day of the week is Friday." << endl;
break;
case 's':
case 'S':
cout << "The day of the week is Friday." << endl;
break;
case 'u':
case 'U':
cout << "The day of the week is Sunday." << endl;
break;
default:
cout << "You have entered an invalid letter program aborting." << endl;
}
return 0;
}

When I ran the program I hit the letter 'm' and I got 'the letter you have entered is .0' and then it also stated the default error catching statement 'you have entered and invalid letter, program aborting'

and Idea why this is happening?

[Shinisama]

Never mind lol I'm retarded. I got it, I was using an int for the variable, not a char. Thanks for the help!

[laserlight]

Good to hear that
By the way, please post code in [code][/code] bbcode tags.