how do you know when to use operator overloading?

[lotrsimp12345]

I understand the concept but i don't know when to use and what my teacher expects when he says overload certain operators.

[Ancient Dragon]

Normally overload operators so that you can do mathematical or other operations with c++ classes. for example: cout << MyClass; assuming MyClass is an instance of some c++ class and you want that class to print the value of its class variables to the screen. Or you might want to add them MyClass++; There are lots of things you can do with overloaded operators, those are just two of them.

Which operators to overload depends on the c++ class and what you want it to do.

[minas1]

You overload an operator when it makes sense to do so.

Say that you create a custom string class MyString.

It makes sense to overload the + operator, but not the ~.

[Dave Sinkula]

http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/operator-overloading.html

[lotrsimp12345]

i have a project which i am working on. I am supposed to read in a phrase then every time it encounters a space the word is supposed to go to a newline in my output. The phrase can take up only one line. The phrase can be read from a file or from cin. The phrase contains spaces so i am guessing you are supposed to overload input >> to make it take a space containing line when they enter cin>>string word. by overloading with getline()???

[minas1]

Well try it :)

[lotrsimp12345]

i have tried it just not sure why he wants me to overload the >> operator.

[lotrsimp12345]

so basically here i want the buffer to continue to read until it hits the \n character?