Question

I am using ifstream and and ostream to serialize my data but I am surprised to discover the `<<‘ operator can’t seperate two adjacent strings and seperating them would be quite complicated.

class Name
{
string first_name;
string last name;


friend std::ostream& operator<< (std::ostream& os, const Name& _name)
{
     os << _name.first_name << _name.last_name; 
     return os;
}

friend std::istream& operator>> (std::istream& is, Name& _name)
{
     is >> _name.first_name >> _name.last_name;

     return is;
}

This doesn’t work because << and >> doesn’t write null terminator characters and ifstream reads the whole string in variable (first_name) which is kinda disappointing. How can I store the two strings separately so I can read them separately as well? I don’t understand what is the motivation of << concatenating all the strings in ostream so we can’t read them back seperatly!?

Answer 1

Often times you want to concatenate strings with ostream (commonly stringstream). If you specifically don’t want them concatenated it’s easy enough to do:

os << _name.first_name << '\n' << _name.last_name;