Question

While doing some experiment on serialization, I noticed that my object name is lost when the object is retrieved. Would you please show me what is going on?

void nDB::serialize(macro* myMacro) {
    ofstream ar("macro.dat", ios::binary);
    ar.write((char*)myMacro,sizeof(*myMacro));
}

macro* nDB::deserialize() {
    macro* tmp_macro = (macro*)safemalloc(sizeof(macro));
    ifstream ar("macro.dat", ios::binary);
    ar.read((char*)tmp_macro,sizeof(*tmp_macro));
    printf("My macro name is %s\n",tmp_macro->get_name());
    return tmp_macro;
}

And this is what my output is

My macro name is \uffffs\uffff>

Thank you very much,

Answer 1

You are only storing the static memory for your object. Any dynamically allocated memory your object uses (such as std::string, std::vector or anything allocated with malloc, or new) will not be saved since they are located on the heap. You have to serialize and deserialize all dynamically allocated memory as well.