Member Functions of Classes in C++

Member functions are the functions, which have their declaration inside the class definition and works on the data members of the class. The definition of member functions can be inside or outside the definition of class.

If the member function is defined inside the class definition it can be defined directly, but if its defined outside the class, then we have to use the scope resolution :: operator along with class name alng with function name.

For example:

class Cube
{
    public:
    int side;
    /*
        Declaring function getVolume 
        with no argument and return type int.
    */
    int getVolume();     
};

If we define the function inside class then we don't not need to declare it first, we can directly define the function.

class Cube
{
    public:
    int side;
    int getVolume()
    {
        return side*side*side;      //returns volume of cube
    }
};

But if we plan to define the member function outside the class definition then we must declare the function inside class definition and then define it outside.

class Cube
{
    public:
    int side;
    int getVolume();
}

// member function defined outside class definition
int Cube :: getVolume()
{
    return side*side*side;
}

The main function for both the function definition will be same. Inside main() we will create object of class, and will call the member function using dot . operator.

Calling Class Member Function in C++

Similar to accessing a data member in the class, we can also access the public member functions through the class object using the dot operator (.).

Below we have a simple code example, where we are creating an object of the class Cube and calling the member function getVolume():

int main()
{
    Cube C1;
    C1.side = 4;    // setting side value
    cout<< "Volume of cube C1 = "<< C1.getVolume();
}

Volume of cube C1 = 16

Similarly we can define the getter and setter functions to access private data members, inside or outside the class definition.