Accessing a nonmember function of a derived class from a base class

Question

I'm trying to call a nonmember function of a derived class from a base class, but getting this error:

error: no matching function for call to 'generate_vectorlist(const char&)'

Here's the relevant code snippets from the base class:

//Element.cpp
#include "Vector.h"
    ...

string outfile;
cin >> outfile;
const char* outfile_name = outfile.c_str();
generate_vectorlist(*outfile_name); //ERROR
...

and the derived class (this is a template class, so everything's in the header):

//Vector.h 
    template <class T>
void generate_vectorlist(const char* outfile_name = "input.txt" )
{
    std::ofstream vectorlist(outfile_name);
    if (vectorlist.is_open())
        for (Element::vciter iter = Element::vectors.begin(); iter!=Element::vectors.end(); iter++) 
        {
            Vector<T>* a = new Vector<T>(*iter);
            vectorlist << a->getx() << '\t' << a->gety() << '\t'<< a->getz() << std::endl;
            delete a;
        }
    else { std::cout << outfile_name << " cannot be opened." << std::endl;}
    vectorlist.close();
}

My guess is there's just a small syntax thing that I'm missing. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You're dereferencing the pointer so you're passing a const char, not a const char*.

try this:

generate_vectorlist(outfile_name);