Random Stream Generator
(FSC-BCS-370-HW1)
Output
Assignment Context
This project was the first of a three part series of assignments for my C++ Data Structures class.
The goal of this assignment was to generate a set of random letters and numbers to act as instructions for future parts.
This project was made using C++ in Visual Studio 2019.
Features
This C++ code generates a random stream of characters and numbers and writes it to a file.
It contains two different sequences of random numbers.
- one for the letters, decided between 0 and 5
- one for the number to follow "A" between INT_MIN and INT_MAX.
How It Works
The randomStream function takes two arguments: filename, which is a string representing the name of the file to which the output will be written, and iterations, an integer representing the number of lines to be written to the file.
Inside the function, there are two random number generators initialized with std::random_device and std::mt19937 and seeded with rd1() and rd2() respectively.
The dis1 and dis2 objects are std::uniform_int_distribution objects that are used to generate random integers between 0 and 5, and between INT_MIN and INT_MAX (the minimum and maximum values of the int type), respectively.
The function then declares a temporary integer variable named temp, and an array of 6 strings called letters, which holds the letters "A", "D", "P", "E", "C", and "S".
The ofstream object named outputFile is created, which is used to write the output to the file with the name specified in the filename argument.
The function then enters a for loop that will repeat iterations times.
In each iteration of the loop, the dis1 object is used to generate a random integer between 0 and 5, which is stored in the temp variable.
If temp is equal to 0, the function writes the letter "A" to the output file, followed by a space and a random integer generated using the dis2 object.
If temp is not equal to 0, the function writes the letter at index temp of the letters array to the output file.
If the current iteration is not the last iteration, the function also writes a newline character to the output file.
After the loop completes, the output file is closed with the close() method of the outputFile object.
The main function prompts the user to input a filename and the number of iterations, then calls the randomStream function with those inputs.