Writing Your Own Manipulators Without Arguments
The latest version of this topic can be found at Writing Your Own Manipulators Without Arguments.
Writing manipulators that do not use arguments requires neither class derivation nor use of complex macros. Suppose your printer requires the pair <ESC>[ to enter bold mode. You can insert this pair directly into the stream:
cout <<"regular " <<'\033' <<'[' <<"boldface" <<endl;
Or you can define the bold
manipulator, which inserts the characters:
ostream& bold(ostream& os) {
return os <<'\033' <<'[';
}
cout <<"regular " <<bold <<"boldface" <<endl;
The globally defined bold
function takes an ostream
reference argument and returns the ostream
reference. It is not a member function or a friend because it does not need access to any private class elements. The bold
function connects to the stream because the stream's <<
operator is overloaded to accept that type of function, using a declaration that looks something like this:
_Myt& operator<<(ios_base& (__cdecl *_Pfn)(ios_base&))
{ // call ios_base manipulator
(*_Pfn)(*(ios_base *)this);
return (*this);
}
You can use this feature to extend other overloaded operators. In this case, it is incidental that bold
inserts characters into the stream. The function is called when it is inserted into the stream, not necessarily when the adjacent characters are printed. Thus, printing could be delayed because of the stream's buffering.