In my classes, what should I change the cout/cin things with?

Question

So basically I've just wrote my program with simple code using cout/cin in my one of my class methods(functions). I know it's bad and shouldn't be done, what should I switch them with?

For example right now I have class Human. It has some fields (variables) like gender, height, age.

I got a method called getInfo() and it's basically a lot of

cout << "Whats your age?" << endl;
cin >> age;

And so on. What should I change them to? Should I use something like

ostream& operator<<(ostream &o, const Human &s) 
istream& operator>>(istream &i, Human &s)

I have these functions written down but they're basically just for toString or not?

And what should I use toString for? (Need to have toString - task for my project thingy).

Answer 1

You can make getInfo generic on the input and output streams, e.g.:

void Human::getInfo(std::istream& input, std::ostream& output) {
    output << "What's your age?" << std::endl;
    input >> age;
    // etc.
}

toStrings usually return a string representation of the object, so it could look something like this:

std::string Human::toString() const {
    std::string string;
    string += "Human(\n";
    string += "    age: " + std::to_string(age) + "\n";
    // etc.
    string += ")";
    return string;
}