Template Class not working

[jessemelhuish]

As an assignment at the beginning of my class I had to create a class to read in integer form a file and print them back out in another(combination review of file IO and classes). Now I am supposed to take that class and make it a template class so that it will work with any data type. I did that, and it tests fine with ints, but when I throw it another class I used it goes crazy....Here's the read function and the overloaded extraction operator for the other class. NOTE: array is declared to be of type TYPE.

template<class TYPE>
bool Reader<TYPE>::read_array()
{
  //Also, since the first number could be wrong, I am going to just ignore it
  //This function will return false if there are more than 50 entries in the file.
  int temppos(0);

  inFile >> readSize;

  while ((inFile >> array[temppos]) && temppos <= SIZE)   //Do while there are items to read and we have not exceeded 50
    {
      temppos++;   ///Make sure to increase the position
    }

  if (!inFile.eof())   //There are still numbers in the file
    {
      cerr << "There were too many entries in the file\n";
      return false;
    }

  if (readSize != temppos)   //If the size indicated was false
    {
      cout << "Warning: There were a different number of entries in the file than information from the file indicated!!!\n"
	   << "Don't Panic!  It's OK." << endl;   //It's amusing to me
      readSize = temppos;   //Set the value correct
    }

  return true;
}

And:

istream& operator >> (istream & input, Card & theCard)
{
  int suit, rank;

  input >> suit;
  input >> rank;
  theCard.change(suit, rank);

  return input;
}

Thanks for any help!

[kbw]

Your read_array doesn't really stand alone. It uses a global in array called array that is SIZE big.

These types don't change when TYPE is changed from int to string for example. Doing so causes read_array() to attempt to read a string into the int array.

So clearly, the function must take the array as a parameter that is dependent on TYPE.