Problem I was just trying to debug a set of file-manipulation routines I wrote f

Question

Problem
I was just trying to debug a set of file-manipulation routines I wrote for a program I am working on. One of them kept returning an INVALID_HANDLE error.

Explanation
I figured out what the problem was. It turns out that because I provided several overloads so that I could call the function with either a file handle or filename, I ended up creating ambiguous overloads.

For example (not variadic functions; the ellipses are just for simplification purposes):

INT CopyFileSection ( HANDLE fIn, HANDLE fOut,

Explanation / Answer

The easiest way to limit the combinatorial explosion of your overloads is to introduce a small helper class that can accept all the various types and convert them to a single common type.

For example

class FileHelper {
public:
FileHelper(HANDLE& h) : handle(h) {}
FileHelper(const TCHAR* fName) : handle(openFile(fName) {}
FileHelper(const std::string& fName) : handle(openFile(fName) {}

HANDLE getHandle() const { return handle; }
private:
HANDLE handle;
}

INT CopyFileSection ( FileHelper fIn, FileHelper fOut,

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