Templates are generic due to their type unawareness. However, there are cases where you need a special behavior for a specific type. C++ supports these cases by means of template specialization. A specialized template is defined explicitly for handling a certain type. This feature is useful when you want to optimize your template by overriding the general template definition, or when the general behavior is inadequate for a specific type. For example, the following template returns the lower of its two arguments:

 template < class T > T min(T f, T s){	return f < s? f: s; }

Although this algorithm is efficient, it does not work appropriately on c-strings. Instead of returning the lower string according to a lexical comparison, it merely returns the lower memory address. In order to avert this problem, a specialized version of the template is defined. Whenever the compiler has to instantiate the min template, it will use the following specialized version for arguments of type const char * and the general version for all other types:

 template <> //the empty angular brackets signal a specialized version of an existing template  const char * min(const char * f,  const char * s) {	int n = strcmp(f, s); //lexical comparison	return n > 0? s : f; //return the lower value string rather than the lower address}

The min template can be used like this:

 int n = 1, m=5;const char *f = "first"; const char *l = "last";int lowerint = min(n,m); //non-specialized version of min called; lower = 1const char *lowerchar = min(f, l); //specialized version called, lowerchar = "first"

Notes about template specializations:
1. The types must match exactly, for example, char *, unsigned const char * or const char [8] types are all different from const char * and hence, the compiler will not call the above specialized version for any of these.
2. Any number of specializations is allowed. In our case, we could have defined a special version for wchar_t strings or string objects as well.
3. All specializations have to appear in the source file after the general version.