Simplifying fractions

[grmorris]

Hey all, I'm working on a program that takes two fractions as input and performs an operation on them (+,-,*,/). I've overloaded all the operators and written a function to reduce the result to lowest terms, but I'm having a small problem with negative fractions. It's reducing them right, but it puts the negative sign on the denominator instead of the numerator (ie 1 / -2 ). I want to have the negative sign on the numerator ( -1 / 2 ). It's probably a really easy fix that's looking me straight in the face, but after looking at this code for as long as I have, my brain is just too fried. Can anyone help?

    rationalNumbers reduce(const rationalNumbers& fraction)
    {
        rationalNumbers reduced;
        reduced.numerator=fraction.numerator;
        reduced.denominator=fraction.denominator;
        int temp=reduced.numerator*reduced.denominator;
        if (temp>0) //If the result is a positive number
        {
            for (temp; temp>1; temp--)
            {
                if ((reduced.numerator%temp==0) && (reduced.denominator%temp==0))
                {
                    reduced.numerator/=temp;
                    reduced.denominator/=temp;
                }
            }
        }
        else if (temp<0) //If the result is a negative number
        {
            for (temp; temp<-1; temp++)
            {
                if ((reduced.numerator%temp==0) && (reduced.denominator%temp==0))
                {
                    reduced.numerator/=temp;
                    reduced.denominator/=temp;
                }
            }
        }
        return reduced;
    }

[Ganon11]

Why not add an explicit check? If the denominator is negative, but the numerator is positive, multiply them both by -1.

[grmorris]

Thanks, that definitely does it. After trying to understand overloading operators all day (I hate the syntax), I think I'm looking at things and trying to make them more difficult than they should be. That was a very simple fix. :D

        if ((reduced.numerator>0) && (reduced.denominator<0))
        {
            reduced.numerator*=-1;
            reduced.denominator*=-1;
        }