Thread: ostream valid flag?

  1. #1
    Registered User
    Join Date
    May 2003
    Posts
    82

    ostream valid flag?

    I have a suspicion this is a trivial problem, but I can't figure out the vocab to do a decent google/forums search on it.

    I'm writing a class member function that takes an ostream as an argument and then outputs some formatted private member data. I'm curious if there is a way to check to see if it is valid to use the stream insertion operator, for example if the client driver passes an ifstream that hasn't been succesfully opened. I don't really understand that possible states and flags of an ostream, and the references I've looked through so far deal with file streams and standard output streams (cout/cerr) as different topics so I'm not which information applies to all ostreams.

    My code looks something like this:
    Code:
    void MyClass::printData(std::ostream& out) {
    
        // if (cannot write to out)
        // throw domain_error;  // or more appropriate exception?
    
        out << data << std::endl;
    
        return;
    }
    Thank you

  2. #2
    Registered User
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Posts
    311
    The easy answer is
    Code:
    bool MyClass::printData(std::ostream& out) {return out << data << std::endl;}
    The most significant states are
    s.good() -- all previous operations worked, next operation is expected to succed
    s.eof() -- next operation will fail (end of file)
    s.fail() -- prev operation failed, no data lost
    s.bad() -- The wings have fallen off, data lost, stream courrupt

    In a boolean context a stream (and os << a returns os) is cast to a void * that is null iff failbit or badbit are set, and a pointer as a boolean is false iff null. In general you should not throw exceptions for stream failures as the caller can set the stream to do this itself via ios::exceptions()

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