Conversion Operators (also known as User Defined Conversions)

In C++ you can create conversion operators, operators that allow the compiler to convert between your types and other defined types. There are two types of conversion operators, implicit and explicit ones.

Implicit Conversion Operators (C++98/C++03 and C++11)

An implicit conversion operator allows the compiler to implicitly convert (like the conversion between int and long) the value of a user-defined type to some other type.

The following is a simple class with an implicit conversion operator:

class my_string {
public:
  operator const char*() const {return data_;} // This is the conversion operator
private:
  const char* data_;
};

Implicit conversion operators, like one-argument constructors, are user-defined conversions. Compilers will grant one user-defined conversion when trying to match a call to an overloaded function.

void f(const char*);

my_string str;
f(str); // same as f( str.operator const char*() )

At first this seems very helpful, but the problem with this is that the implicit conversion even kicks in when it isn’t expected to. In the following code, void f(const char*) will be called because my_string() is not an lvalue, so the first does not match:

void f(my_string&);
void f(const char*);

f(my_string());

Beginners easily get this wrong and even experienced C++ programmers are sometimes surprised because the compiler picks an overload they didn’t suspect. These problems can be mitigated by explicit conversion operators.

Explicit Conversion Operators (C++11)

Unlike implicit conversion operators, explicit conversion operators will never kick in when you don't expect them to. The following is a simple class with an explicit conversion operator:

class my_string {
public:
  explicit operator const char*() const {return data_;}
private:
  const char* data_;
};

Notice the explicit. Now when you try to execute the unexpected code from the implicit conversion operators, you get a compiler error:

prog.cpp: In function ‘int main()’:
prog.cpp:15:18: error: no matching function for call to ‘f(my_string)’
prog.cpp:15:18: note: candidates are:
prog.cpp:11:10: note: void f(my_string&)
prog.cpp:11:10: note:   no known conversion for argument 1 from ‘my_string’ to ‘my_string&’
prog.cpp:12:10: note: void f(const char*)
prog.cpp:12:10: note:   no known conversion for argument 1 from ‘my_string’ to ‘const char*’

To invoke the explicit cast operator, you have to use static_cast, a C-style cast, or a constructor style cast ( i.e. T(value) ).

However, there is one exception to this: The compiler is allowed to implicitly convert to bool. In addition, the compiler is not allowed to do another implicit conversion after it converts to bool (a compiler is allowed to do 2 implicit conversions at a time, but only 1 user-defined conversion at max).

Because the compiler will not cast "past" bool, explicit conversion operators now remove the need for the Safe Bool idiom. For example, smart pointers before C++11 used the Safe Bool idiom to prevent conversions to integral types. In C++11, the smart pointers use an explicit operator instead because the compiler is not allowed to implicitly convert to an integral type after it explicitly converted a type to bool.

Continue to Overloading new and delete.