cout char* printing address instead of value

Question

In a template class, I overloaded the ostream<< operator with the following:

friend std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream &out,
        const DataItem<T> &cDataItem) {
    out << cDataItem.m_value;
    return out;
}

And m_value is declared as a pointer to the generic type

T *m_value;

But for some reason, when I cout the object, it prints an hexadecimal value, which I guess is the address and NOT the value, as I expect:

Value: 0x7fff418f9d40

I learned that cout with a char* should print the content of the char*, not the address. Why then is this happening? Is the template a problem?

Answer 1

char * is a special case. For any other pointer, unless you have some specialization you implemented yourself, outputting a pointer outputs that pointer, not what it points to.

Answer 2

The problem is that in your case, T is char[40] which is a pointer already (equivalent to char*). This means that if you use T*, it becomes char** and that's what you are trying to print. Since it's a pointer to the pointer, generic template for pointers get applied and the address is printed.

For a test, you may try to print:

friend std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream &out,
        const DataItem<T> &cDataItem) {
    out << *cDataItem.m_value;
    return out;
}

In this case, you will dereference the pointer to the original value, that is char[40] and you should get the expected output.

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Also, I think your operator= is wrong. Since you pass T to it, and assign it to T* m_value, you implicitly store a pointer to a local value. You probably want to make it take T* likewise in the constructor. Or a T& reference in both cases.