Problem with polymorphism and cout

Just a note : You pass an ostream to the ViewFile method, but never use it. You probably want to replace every cout in the ViewFile method with ostream, no ? (and you probably also want to pass the ostream to ShowInfo)


>> cause my last name is longer than the first.  So I don't understand why this is happening.

Are you sure that FirstName contains a value ?

>> Here is an image of what is happening.

How does this image relate to the code you posted ?

Right.  I have been trying differen things because I know that you can only pass ostream by reference.  So I figured I would try to create one string and then use cout.write to output the entire line.  I have also used operator overloads to do this as well but all of this returns the exact output.

The image relates to
      this->ShowInfo();

      Person& _person = _iperson[0];

      _outLine.append("Name:\t\t");
      _outLine.append(this->_iperson[contactNum].LastName);
      _outLine.append(", ");
      _outLine.append(this->_iperson[contactNum].FirstName);
      _outLine.append(" ");
      _outLine.append(this->_iperson[contactNum].MiddleName);
      _outLine.append("\n");

      cout.write(_outLine.c_str(), _outLine.size());

But if I do
cout << this->_iperson[contactNum].LastName << ", " << ....

It will stil output the same as the image.  The same thing if I replace cout with obj.  It is only happening after anything to do with the class Person.  Just doesn't make any sense.

If you need to look at the code you can find it here.  Thanks for the help.

http://www.4shared.com/file/28876173/8ca26784/Week4-JasonBullard.html?dirPwdVerified=953d2cdd

The problem is that your input file (MyBook.addr) is corrupt ... There are \r characters after the values, for example :

        <FirstName>John\r</FirstName>

Clean up your input file, and things should work better ...


And a few more things I saw when looking through your code quickly :

1) In Contacts::LoadFile(), you have this :

      this->_iperson.empty();

empty() only returns a bool that says whether the vector is empty or not ... It doesn't actually empty the vector. Use clear() for that.


2) Also, in Contacts::LoadFile() :

        if (_tempVal.find("<Person>") != string::npos)
        {
                  /* New instance of Person */
            Person _tempPerson;
        }

which createsa a new Person instance ... However, it immediately goes out of scope at the }. Instead you probably just want to empty the _tempPerson object in this if (ie. reset all fields).

Note that the same is true for the other if's you have (address, etc.).


3) In Contacts::GetValue, you have this :

        inStr.swap(inStr.erase(pos, firstStr.length()));

The swap is unnecessary - you could simply do :

        inStr.erase(pos, firstStr.length());

Just a thought ... you might want to implement this differently : instead of just erasing the firstStr and lastStr, you should get the part of the string that is between firstStr and lastStr ... ie. get rid of whatever is before and after too, as well as skipping whitespace.

Thanks for the info.

I will make the changes suggested but the last one I don't know how to do.  How do I go about getting the data between those two identifiers?  I am learning C++ so I am not familiar with everything.  I was looking at Regexs but that was too advanced for me right now.

Thank you for the outstanding help.  I made all the suggested changes as well as correcting the file and all of it works perfectly.

Thanks again.