Member Avatar for lotrsimp12345

I understand the concept but i don't know when to use and what my teacher expects when he says overload certain operators.

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Operator overloads belong where an operator's usual meaning cleanly matches the type and makes client code clearer, not as a shortcut to avoid writing a clear function. Echoing : prefer meaningful overloads. For I/O it's common to provide stream operators so custom types plug into iostreams; that idea is implicit in 's comment and the resource mentioned.

The assignment described — read a single-line phrase containing spaces and produce one word per output line — can be solved two ways. If the exercise does not explicitly require overloading, reading a full line with the standard library and then splitting is the simplest, least-surprising design. If the task specifically asks for an overloaded extraction operator, implement a non-member operator>> that uses std::getline to consume the whole input line and then tokenizes it into the object's internal representation. That keeps stream semantics consistent (the newline is consumed) and lets code like stream >> phraseObj; work for both files and cin.

Example implementation (minimal):

#include <string>
#include <vector>
#include <sstream>
#include <istream>

struct Phrase {
    std::vector<std::string> words;
};

std::istream& operator>>(std::istream& is, Phrase& p) {
    p.words.clear();
    std::string line;
    if (!std::getline(is, line)) return is;
    std::istringstream iss(line);
    std::string w;
    while (iss >> w) p.words.push_back(w);
    return is;
}

Notes and cautions: keep operator>> as a non-member that returns the stream, check stream state, and document any nonstandard behavior (for example, reading a whole line instead of a token). Be careful mixing extraction operators and raw getline calls elsewhere (manage leftover newlines or use std::ws/ignore). This approach satisfies an overloading requirement while preserving clear, predictable I/O behavior for future readers of the code.

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Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

Normally overload operators so that you can do mathematical or other operations with c++ classes. for example: cout << MyClass; assuming MyClass is an instance of some c++ class and you want that class to print the value of its class variables to the screen. Or you might want to add them MyClass++; There are lots of things you can do with overloaded operators, those are just two of them.

Which operators to overload depends on the c++ class and what you want it to do.

Member Avatar for minas1

You overload an operator when it makes sense to do so.

Say that you create a custom string class MyString.

It makes sense to overload the + operator, but not the ~.

Member Avatar for lotrsimp12345

i have a project which i am working on. I am supposed to read in a phrase then every time it encounters a space the word is supposed to go to a newline in my output. The phrase can take up only one line. The phrase can be read from a file or from cin. The phrase contains spaces so i am guessing you are supposed to overload input >> to make it take a space containing line when they enter cin>>string word. by overloading with getline()???

Member Avatar for minas1

Well try it :)

Member Avatar for lotrsimp12345

i have tried it just not sure why he wants me to overload the >> operator.

Member Avatar for lotrsimp12345

so basically here i want the buffer to continue to read until it hits the \n character?

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