Assigning cout to a variable name

Question

In ANSI C++, how can I assign the cout stream to a variable name? What I want to do is, if the user has specified an output file name, I send output there, otherwise, send i

Answer 1

This took about two hours to get. Basically, I have a external class running a test suite. I send in a delegate to run the tests, so in order to have access to output I need to send in an output stream. I guess I could have done a different stream per test. Anyways, I wanted to pass in the ofstream to be used later.

// Main code to create Test Suite Object
ofstream debugFile("debug.txt");
TestSuiteObject* myTestSuite = new TestSuiteObject(&debugFile);

// Test Suite Object
class TestSuiteObject: public Test::Suite
{
public:
 TestSuiteObject(std::ofstream* debug) : m_debug(*debug)
 {
  m_debug << "some witty remark" << std::endl;
  TEST_ADD(TestSuiteObject::test1);
  TEST_ADD(TestSuiteObject::test2);
  TEST_ADD(TestSuiteObject::test3);

 }

 void test1();
 void test2();
 void test3();

private:
 std::ofstream& m_debug;
};