I'd like to control what is written to a stream, i.e. cout, for an object of a custom class. Is that possible in C++? In Java you could override the toString() method for similar purpose.
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In C++ you can overload operator<< for ostream and your custom class:
class A {
public:
int i;
};
std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream &strm, const A &a) {
return strm << "A(" << a.i << ")";
}
This way you can output instances of your class on streams:
A x = ...;
std::cout << x << std::endl;
In case your operator<< wants to print out internals of class A and really needs access to its private and protected members you could also declare it as a friend function:
class A {
private:
friend std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream&, const A&);
int j;
};
std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream &strm, const A &a) {
return strm << "A(" << a.j << ")";
}
As an extension to what John said, if you want to extract the string representation and store it in a std::string do this:
#include <sstream>
// ...
// Suppose a class A
A a;
std::stringstream sstream;
sstream << a;
std::string s = sstream.str(); // or you could use sstream >> s but that would skip out whitespace
std::stringstream is located in the <sstream> header.
In C++11, to_string is finally added to the standard.
http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/basic_string/to_string
The question has been answered. But I wanted to add a concrete example.
class Point{
public:
Point(int theX, int theY) :x(theX), y(theY)
{}
// Print the object
friend ostream& operator <<(ostream& outputStream, const Point& p);
private:
int x;
int y;
};
ostream& operator <<(ostream& outputStream, const Point& p){
int posX = p.x;
int posY = p.y;
outputStream << "x="<<posX<<","<<"y="<<posY;
return outputStream;
}
This example requires understanding operator overload.
You can also do it this way, allowing polymorphism:
class Base {
public:
virtual std::ostream& dump(std::ostream& o) const {
return o << "Base: " << b << "; ";
}
private:
int b;
};
class Derived : public Base {
public:
virtual std::ostream& dump(std::ostream& o) const {
return o << "Derived: " << d << "; ";
}
private:
int d;
}
std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream& o, const Base& b) { return b.dump(o); }
Source: Stackoverflow.com