Ok, this is for homework about hashtables, but this is the simple stuff I thought I was able to do from earlier classes, and I'm tearing my hair out. The professor is not being responsive enough, so I thought I'd try here.

We have a hashtable of stock objects.The stock objects are created like so:

stock("IBM", "International Business Machines", 2573, date(date::MAY, 23, 1967))

my constructor looks like:

stock::stock(char const * const symbol, char const * const name, int sharePrice, date priceDate): symbol(NULL), name(NULL), sharePrice(sharePrice), dateOfPrice(priceDate)
{    
setSymbol(symbol);
setName(name);
}

and setSymbol looks like this: (setName is indentical):

void stock::setSymbol(const char* symbol)  
{  
if (this->symbol)  
    delete [] this->symbol;  
this->symbol = new char[strlen(symbol)+1];  
strcpy(this->symbol,symbol);  
}  

and it refuses to allocate on the line

this->symbol = new char[strlen(symbol)+1];

with a std::bad_alloc. name and symbol are declared

char * name;  
char * symbol;

I feel like this is exactly how I've done it in previous code.I'm sure it's something silly with pointers. Can anyone help?