Multipurpose *

[Tovakoo]

I’m a little confused about the use of the * in the Ulog.
Wasn’t it used as a converting operator in the Obstacle assault course for converting Fstring into string as well?

FString MyString = “MyStringValue”;
UE_LOG…TEXT("%s is moving", *MyStringValue);

Are there a lot of these multipurpose operators?

[DanM]

Most operators are overloadable meaning you can define what it means for your type. This is how things you’ve already used work. For example

struct FVector
{
    double X;
    double Y;
    double Z;
};

void Example()
{
    FVector V1{ 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 };
    FVector V2{ 10.0, 20.0, 30.0 };

    V1 + V2 * 100.0;
}

This code won’t compile as FVector + FVector nor FVector * double have not been defined, only the built-in types already have defined meaning. Though each definition of those is straight forward and intuitive to implement.

FVector operator+(const FVector& Lhs, const FVector& Rhs)
{
    return FVector{ Lhs.X + Rhs.X, Lhs.Y + Rhs.Y, Lhs.Z + Rhs.Z };
}

FVector operator*(const FVector& Vec, double Scale)
{
    return FVector{ Vec.X * Scale, Vec.Y * Scale, Vec.Z * Scale };
}

Each definition relying on the definitions of the arithmetic operators for double.

---

The same thing is with the case of FString and pointers regarding *.

[SteveMerritt]

To clarify what Dan said - FString overloads the ‘*’ operator which returns a pointer to the internal character array.

It can be a little confusing at first because normally something like *MyPtr reads as a dereference of the pointer variable, which is a standard C/C++ function (as opposed to an overloaded operator in the FString case).