C++ equivalent of Java's toString?

Question

In C++ you can overload operator<< for ostream and your custom class:

class A {
public:
  int i;
};

std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream &strm, const A &a) {
  return strm << "A(" << a.i << ")";
}

This way you can output instances of your class on streams:

A x = ...;
std::cout << x << std::endl;

In case your operator<< wants to print out internals of class A and really needs access to its private and protected members you could also declare it as a friend function:

class A {
private:
  friend std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream&, const A&);
  int j;
};

std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream &strm, const A &a) {
  return strm << "A(" << a.j << ")";
}

You can also do it this way, allowing polymorphism:

class Base {
public:
   virtual std::ostream& dump(std::ostream& o) const {
      return o << "Base: " << b << "; ";
   }
private:
  int b;
};

class Derived : public Base {
public:
   virtual std::ostream& dump(std::ostream& o) const {
      return o << "Derived: " << d << "; ";
   }
private:
   int d;
}

std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream& o, const Base& b) { return b.dump(o); }

In C++11, to_string is finally added to the standard.

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/basic_string/to_string

As an extension to what John said, if you want to extract the string representation and store it in a std::string do this:

#include <sstream>    
// ...
// Suppose a class A
A a;
std::stringstream sstream;
sstream << a;
std::string s = sstream.str(); // or you could use sstream >> s but that would skip out whitespace

std::stringstream is located in the <sstream> header.

The question has been answered. But I wanted to add a concrete example.

class Point{

public:
      Point(int theX, int theY) :x(theX), y(theY)
      {}
      // Print the object
      friend ostream& operator <<(ostream& outputStream, const Point& p);
private:
      int x;
      int y;
};

ostream& operator <<(ostream& outputStream, const Point& p){
       int posX = p.x;
       int posY = p.y;

       outputStream << "x="<<posX<<","<<"y="<<posY;
      return outputStream;
}

This example requires understanding operator overload.