How do I deal with the max macro in windows.h colliding with max in std?

So I was trying to get valid integer input from cin, and used an answer to this question.

It recommended:

#include <Windows.h> // includes WinDef.h which defines min() max()
#include <iostream>
using std::cin;
using std::cout;

void Foo()
{
    int delay = 0;
    do
    {
        if(cin.fail())
        {
            cin.clear();
            cin.ignore(std::numeric_limits<std::streamsize>::max(), '\n');
        }
        cout << "Enter number of seconds between submissions: ";
    } while(!(cin >> delay) || delay == 0);
}

Which gives me an error on Windows, saying that the max macro doesn't take that many arguments. Which means I have to do this

do
{
    if(cin.fail())
    {
        cin.clear();
#undef max
        cin.ignore(std::numeric_limits<std::streamsize>::max(), '\n');
    }
    cout << "Enter number of seconds between submissions: ";
} while(!(cin >> delay) || delay == 0);

To get it to work. That's pretty ugly; is there a better way to work around this issue? Maybe I should be storing the definition of max and redefining it afterward?

Define the macro NOMINMAX:

>This will suppress the min and max definitions in Windef.h.

Just wrap the function name in parenthesis:

(std::numeric_limits<size_type>::max)()

No need for the NOMINMAX macro in this case, plus you won't get compiler warnings

If you don't know whether somebody else might have included windows.h without NOMINMAX, you might define a dummy macro which can be used to suppress function-like macro invocations without changing the definition:

#define DUMMY
...
std::numeric_limits<std::streamsize>::max DUMMY ()

Not really pretty either, but works and is non-intrusive.

When working with the Windows header file, I prefer to hide it as much as I can by including it only in specialized code and header files (using pimpl if necessary), because it throws just too much garbage into the global namespace.

Are you just trying to flush the cin buffer? I always just used:

cin.ignore(cin.rdbuf()->in_avail());

If you happen to use GDI+, the approach with NOMINMAX won't work for you, because headers of GDI+ require min or max in global namespace.

And the simplest workaround in this case is to undefine min/max when they are no longer needed.

The code sample to illustrate the approach:

//#define NOMINMAX - this won't work
#include <Windows.h>
#include <gdiplus.h>
#undef max
#undef min
...
#include <cxxopts.hpp>