Gfrktyl

so I have been asked to make a cypher which can reverse the order of characters.
Say "ajay"
output "yaja"

so far i have used a very basic botched up code

 #include <iostream>



using namespace std;





int main()

{

    char a;

    char b;

    char c;

    char d;



    cout<< "enter wordn";

    cin>>a;

    cin>>b;

    cin>>c;

cin >>d;





cout<<d<<c<<b<<a;







    return 0;

}

the code cannot work with lesser characters than 4 and obviously, it doesn't work on characters greater than 4.

plus it just looks way too, crappy and direct.
I have started coding from today itself so apologies in advance if the question doesn't match the standards of the community.

When you're faced with a problem like this, you want to analyze what's needed to solve the problem then translate that to code.

What's the best data structure to hold the solution?

Since that problem calls for a collection of characters that need to be manipulated, the best structure for that is string.

What process is best to accomplish the goal?

Firstly, instead of processing everything in main, let's start with a function to do the heavy lifting. It needs to take a string as input and return a string.

To reverse the string, start by analyzing two strings. One the reverse of the other. It's easy to see that successive swaps(first and last, first + 1 and last - 1, first + 2 and last - 2, etc.), would be very efficient in terms of time and memory.

At this point, one can see that dealing with hard limits a for loop would be the simplest loop to accomplish this.

Now what would some code look like?

string ReverseString(string input)

{

    size_t mid = input.size() / 2;

    for (size_t start = 0, end = input.size() - 1; start < mid; ++start, --end)

    {

        char tempChar = input[start];

        input[start] = input[end];

        input[end] = tempChar;

    }

    return input;

}

For this I've assumed that you want a literal solution. The c++ standard library includes a function(reverse in the <algorithm> library) that will accomplish the same thing.