How to cout the std::basic_string

Question

I am trying to cout a basic_string. But cout is throwing error. Can I know how to do that

Answer 1

As @Bo Persson mentioned, another way of defining a tcout type would be using references with the correct stream types. Though there are a few more things to consider when doing that, as you'll easily end up with linker issues due to multiple or missing definitions.

What works for me is declaring these types as external references in a header and defining them once in a source file. This also works in a precompiled header (stdafx).

Header

namespace std
{
#ifdef UNICODE
    extern wostream& tcout;
#else
    extern ostream& tcout;
#endif // UNICODE
}

Implementation

namespace std
{
#ifdef UNICODE
    wostream& tcout = wcout;
#else
    ostream& tcout = cout;
#endif // UNICODE
}