Using I/O manipulators to control the output of a stream

Apart from the stream-based input/output library, the standard library provides a series of helper functions, called manipulators, that control the input or output streams using operator<< and operator>>. In this recipe, we will look at some of these manipulators and demonstrate their use through some examples that format the output to the console, and will continue showing more manipulators in the next recipes. 

Getting ready

The I/O manipulators are available in the std namespace in headers <ios>, <istream>, <ostream>, and <iomanip>. In this recipe, we will only discuss some of the manipulators from <ios> and <iomanip>.

How to do it...

The following manipulators can be used to control the output or input of a stream:

• boolalpha and noboolalpha enable and disable textual representation of Booleans:

        std::cout << std::boolalpha << true << std::endl;    // true
     ...