Question

I was wondering how to pass a struct array by reference into a function. I found how to do it with pointers but wanted to learn with references too. Here is my code thus far.

struct employeeType
{
string firstName;
...
double monthlyBonus;
};

void readEmpData(ifstream& infile, employeeType *emp, int length);

I thought I just did employeeType& emp or employeeType& emp[] but get errors and everything I have googled just did pointers.

Here is the full code at pastebin for clarification for my learning experiment:
http://pastebin.com/6NfZ3LC4

Answer 1

I assume you want readEmpData to read in an array of employees from a file. In this case, the caller wouldn’t know how many employees there are and so the array and its length should be output parameters. An appropriate signature would be:

void readEmpData(ifstream & infile, employeeType *& emp, int & length);

or

employeeType * readEmpData(ifstream & infile, int & length);

You could also define the operator << for employeeType and read using STL:

vector<employeeType> employees;
copy(istream_iterator(file), istream_iterator(), back_inserter(employees));