Sometimes, you might have an independent function and you might want this function to access the private members of a class.
You can declare this independent function as friend of the class. A friend can access any of the members of a class object, regardless of their access specification.
In the example below, we have an independent function called CurrentWeek. We have declared CurrentWeek within the Album class that it is a friend function.
With this declaration, the function can access the private variable top10 of the Album class.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
class Album {
private:
int top10;
public:
Album(void) : top10(0) {
}
void show(void) {
cout << top10 << endl;
}
friend void CurrentWeek(Album &);
};
void CurrentWeek(Album &alb) {
alb.top10 = alb.top10 + 5;
}
int main() {
Album album;
album.show();
CurrentWeek(album);
album.show();
}
