Hello Everyone, I'm writing a set of classes and I want to be able to print out information about their objects. I want something similar to the to_s function in Ruby or ToString() in Java. Kind of like this, class MyClass { public: char* ToString(); }; Then be able to do printf("%s%s", foo.ToString(), bar.ToString()); The problem is that this will cause a memory leak. ToString() will be forced to allocate the char array and then the pointer will be lost once it's passed into printf. Also doing a lot of string allocation while the game is running doesn't seem like a good idea. I have thought about using a pool of strings but this seems like it would introduce lots of complexity. Does anyone know of a good solution for this kind of thing?

Return a std::string instead of a raw pointer. If it's a performance problem (I.e. you've profiled it and discovered this is a significant problem), then you could keep the string as a member variable and return a const reference to it instead of returning it by value.

If you only use ToString for printing you might also consider overloading the ostream operator instead, see this page.

Quote:Original post by MikeTacular
Blasted! The number of times a moderator has ninja'd me is ridiculous. I mean really.
ninja'd++;

The moderators are out to get you [wink]

Hello,

instead of "printf("%s%s", foo.ToString(), bar.ToString());" which sounds very procedural to me, why not have "foo.Print(), bar.Print();" ?
It probably shouldn't be hard to create some kind of inheritance graph of printable objects.

Isn't it their own responsibility to print themselves?