C++ Cascading Stream Insertion (HW Help)

Question

I found this potential solution in previous stack question. My problem is that it's not outputting to the file.

The program terminates without errors and actually does what it's supposed to do as I have verified this with a cout.

The program takes in a 7-digit phone number. Then writes to a file all possible words that can be made with those 7 digits, respecting the letter-number association on a standard telephone.

Program uses two functions: main and wordGenerator and includes iostream, fstream, & cstdlib

main :

int main()
{
 int phoneNumber[ 7 ] = { 0 }; // holds phone number

 // prompt user to enter phone number
 cout << "Enter a phone number (digits 2 through 9) " << "in the form: xxx-xxxx\n";

 // loop 8 times: 7 digits plus hyphen;
 // hyphen is not placed in phoneNumber
 for ( int u = 0, v = 0; u < 8; u++ )
     {
         int i = cin.get();

         // test if i is between 0 and 9
         if ( i >= '0' && i <= '9' )
             phoneNumber[ v++ ] = i - '0';
         } // end for

 wordGenerator( phoneNumber ); // form words from phone number
} // end main

wordGenerator :

void wordGenerator( const int * const n )
{
cout << "Some Word Forming Magic is going on!" << endl;

// set output stream and open output file
ofstream outFile("phone.dat");

// letters corresponding to each number
const char * phoneLetters[] = {"___", "___", "ABC", "DEF", "GHI", "JKL", "MNO", "PRS", "TUV", "WXY"};

// terminate if file could not be opened
if ( !outFile )
{
    cerr << "File could not be opened! Program Terminating..." << endl;
    exit(1);
}

 int count = 0; // number of words found

 // output all possible combinations
 for ( int i1 = 0; i1 <= 2; i1++ )
     {
         for ( int i2 = 0; i2 <= 2; i2++ )
             {
                 for ( int i3 = 0; i3 <= 2; i3++ )
                     {
                         for ( int i4 = 0; i4 <= 2; i4++ )
                             {
                                 for ( int i5 = 0; i5 <= 2; i5++ )
                                     {
                                         for ( int i6 = 0; i6 <= 2; i6++ )
                                             {
                                                 for ( int i7 = 0; i7 <= 2; i7++ )
                                                     {
/* I think the next 8 lines is what's not working! */
/* Write a series of cascaded stream insertion operations 
to output a set of seven letters to outFile, followed by a space */

outFile
<< phoneLetters[n[0]][i1]
<< phoneLetters[n[1]][i2]
<< phoneLetters[n[2]][i3]
<< phoneLetters[n[3]][i4]
<< phoneLetters[n[4]][i5]
<< phoneLetters[n[5]][i6]
<< phoneLetters[n[6]][i7]
<< " ";

                                                         if ( ++count % 9 == 0 ) // form rows
                                                             outFile << '\n';
                                                         }
                                                 }
                                         }
                                 }
                         }
                 }
         }

//alert user that wordGenerator has completed
cout << "Writing to file..." << endl;

// output phone number
outFile << "\nPhone number is ";

for ( int i = 0; i < 7; i++ )
    {
        if ( i == 3 )
            outFile << '-';

        outFile << n[ i ];

    } // end for


//print results to screen
cout << count / 9 << " words were created from" << endl;

//close output file
outFile.close();

} // end function wordGenerator

Program runs fine. No errors, except nothing is written to the output file phone.dat

Answer 1

I'm so embarrassed to write this. It turns out that the code has been working all along. The output file is saved into /Users/userName/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData and after running the program that directory disappears.

So in order to combat this you must go to XCode's Preferences, click on "Locations" and change the setting for "Derived Data" from "default" to "relative".

I hope this helps someone else in the future...