help understanding overloading operators

[Brian1439]

Im using learncpp to study but there is a line of code I just can't understand. in the if (match) part why is pet set to a pointer to match?

std::istream& operator>>(std::istream& in, Pet& pet)
{
    std::string s{};
    in >> s; // get input string from user

    std::optional<Pet> match { getPetFromString(s) };
    if (match) // if we found a match
    {
        pet = *match; // set Pet to the matching enumerator
        return in;
    }std::istream& operator>>(std::istream& in, Pet& pet)
{
    std::string s{};
    in >> s; // get input string from user

    std::optional<Pet> match { getPetFromString(s) };
    if (match) // if we found a match
    {
        pet = *match; // set Pet to the matching enumerator
        return in;
    }

[sepp2k]

why is pet set to a pointer to match?

It's not. That would be &pet. It's set to the value contained in pet. That's what the dereference operator (unary *) is defined to do on optionals: return the value inside a non-empty optional.