Accessing Characters by Using Bracket Notation
With a standard C-style string, you can use brackets to access individual characters:
char city[40] = "Amsterdam";cout << city[0] << endl; // display the letter A
In C++ the two bracket symbols constitute a single operator, the bracket operator, and you can overload this operator by using a method called operator[]()
. Typically, a binary C++ operator (one with two operands) puts the operator between the two operands, as in 2 + 5
. But the bracket operator places one operand in front of the first bracket and the other operand between the two brackets. Thus, in the expression city[0]
, city
is the first operand, []
is the operator, and 0
is the second operand.
Suppose that opera
is a String
object:
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