Thread: Please help needed with overloading the insertion operator

I am trying to overload the insertion operator for a class linked list which is declared as a friend of class node

Code:

the errors I get are:

'Linkedlist::head' : cannot access private member declared in class 'Linkedlist'
'Node::value' : cannot access private member declared in class 'Node'
Node::next' : cannot access private member declared in class 'Node'

the code begins here:

ostream& operator<<(ostream out,const Linkedlist& List1)
 
 {
     Node* current=List1.head;
    while(current)
    
    {
        out<<current->value<<;
        current=current->next;
    }
    return out;
 }

The problem is that you are accessing private member variables of the LinkedList and Node classes, but this overloaded operator<< is not a friend function of these classes.

If such an interface does not already exist, I suggest that you add two public member functions to the Node class: one to access the value and another to return the next pointer. Then, you can use these public member functions from within this overloaded operator<< implementation.

After you have done this, you would still be accessing the private member variable named head of the LinkedList class. To fix this, it would be appropriate to declare this overloaded operator<< as a friend function of the LinkedList class.

By the way, this is a syntax error:

Code:

out<<current->value<<;

You probably wrote or wanted to write:

Code:

out << current->value;

I suspect your declaration is different from your definition. For example, out should be a reference to an ostream, not an ostream value.