Question

Ok, this is for homework about hashtables, but this is the simple stuff I thought I was able to do from earlier classes, and I’m tearing my hair out. The professor is not being responsive enough, so I thought I’d try here.

We have a hashtable of stock objects.The stock objects are created like so:

stock("IBM", "International Business Machines", 2573, date(date::MAY, 23, 1967))


my constructor looks like:

stock::stock(char const * const symbol, char const * const name, int sharePrice, date priceDate): m_symbol(NULL), m_name(NULL), sharePrice(sharePrice), dateOfPrice(priceDate)
{    
setSymbol(symbol);
setName(name);
}

and setSymbol looks like this: (setName is indentical):

void stock::setSymbol(const char* symbol)  
{  
if (m_symbol)  
    delete [] m_symbol;  
m_symbol = new char[strlen(symbol)+1];  
strcpy(m_symbol,symbol);  
}  

and it refuses to allocate on the line

m_symbol = new char[strlen(symbol)+1];

with a std::bad_alloc. name and symbol are declared

char * m_name;  
char * m_symbol;

It’s definitely strlen() that is going astray. And it doesn’t seem to happen every time.

cout << symbol << strlen(symbol); 

returns IBM correctly, then crashes

Answer 1

As this is tagged C++ can you use std::string instead of doing all the pointer maintenance yourself on char*?

std::string name;
std::string symbol

Then setSymbol becomes easy:

void stock::setSymbol(const char* symbol)  
{
    this->symbol = symbol;
}