Question

I’m trying to overload the assignment operator and would like to clear a few things up if that’s ok.

I have a non member function, bool operator==( const MyClass& obj1, const myClass& obj2 ) defined oustide of my class.

I can’t get at any of my private members for obvious reasons.

So what I think I need to do is to overload the assignment operator. And make assignments in the non member function.

With that said, I think I need to do the following:

1. use my functions and copy information using strcpy or strdup. I used strcpy.
2. go to the assignment operator, bool MyClass::operator=( const MyClass& obj1 );
3. Now we go to the function overloading (==) and assign obj2 to obj1.

I don’t have a copy constructor, so I’m stuck with these:

class Class { private: m_1; m_2; public: .. };  void Class::Func1(char buff[]) const {        strcpy( buff, m_1 );     return; } void Class::Func2(char buff[]) const {     strcpy( buff, m_2 );     return; }  bool Class& Class::operator=(const Class& obj) {      if ( this != &obj ) // check for self assignment.     {         strcpy( m_1, obj.m_1 );          // do this for all other private members.     }     return *this; }  bool operator== (const Class& obj1, const Class& obj2) {          Class MyClass1, MyClass2;     MyClass1 = obj1;     MyClass2 = obj2;           MyClass2 = MyClass1;          // did this change anything? // Microsofts debugger can not get this far.     return true; } 

So as you can probably tell, I’m completely lost in this overloading. Any tips? I do have a completed version overloading the same operator, only with ::, so my private members won’t lose scope. I return my assignments as true and it works in main. Which is the example that I have in my book.

Will overloading the assignment operator and then preforming conversions in the operator== non member function work? Will I then be able to assign objects to each other in main after having completed that step?

Answer 1

I am guessing that you want to compare the two objects. In that case, you can just overload the operator == in class ‘Class’. You don’t need assignment operator.

    class Class     {     public:         Class(int i) : m_i(i){}           bool operator==( const Class& rhs)          {             return m_i == rhs.m_i;          }     private:         int m_i;      };   int main() {    Class t1(10), t2(10);    bool b = (t1 == t2); }