Dynamic Cast

Features #

• dynamic_cast converts a pointer or reference of a class to a pointer or reference in the same inheritance hierarchy.

• It can only be used with polymorphic classes. With dynamic_cast, we cast up, down, and across the inheritance hierarchy.

• Type information at run time is used to determine if the cast is valid.

• If the cast is not possible, we will get a nullptr in case of a pointer, and an std::bad_cast-exception in case of a reference.

• dynamic_cast is mostly used when converting from a derived class to a base class, but can also work the opposite operation.

Example #