Re: How to define inserter or extractor for a class template

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Wed, 8 Oct 2008 02:38:22 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<0a87e029-a1ef-4e96-b0ff-be49f36f3133@w1g2000prk.googlegroups.com>
On Oct 8, 8:57 am, laikon <lai...@gmail.com> wrote:

this question is about how to define friend functions for a
class template.


It's difficult:-).

the following is an example.

template <typename T>
class Array
{
private:
        T* parr;
        int sz;

        friend ostream& operator << (ostream& os, const Array<T>& rhs);


Note that this declares a non-template operator<< as a friend.
That's probably not what you want.

};

template <class T>
ostream& operator << (ostream& os, const Array<T>& rhs)
{
        for (int i = 0; i < rhs.sz; ++i)
                os << rhs.parr[i] << "\t";
        return os;
}

these codes work well in VC++ 6.0, while linking errors are
given in VC ++ 2005.


If you have a declaration of the operator<<, as a template,
before you define the class, I think it should work. In
practice, I've found it more convenient to only use inline
friends, so the problem doesn't come up. Something like:

    template< typename T >
    class Array
    {
        // ...
    public:
        void print( std::ostream& dest ) const ;
        friend std::ostream&
                        operator<<( std::ostream& dest,
                                    Array< T > const& array )
        {
            array.print( dest ) ;
            return *this ;
        }
    } ;

The friend may be a non-template function, but it doesn't
matter, since I don't have to declare it anywhere else.

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