Assigning value to char pointer

I'm confused once again.
I thought we needed to allocate memory before assigning a value to a char*
and also that we needed to use functions like strcpy() to copy something into it.
Then how come this works and does not crash?

Code:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
    char * buf;
    buf = "Hello";
    cout << buf << endl;

    buf = "World!!!!!!!!";
    cout << buf << endl;

    return 0;
}

1. Pick a language for learning, C or C++.
2. "Hello" is a character constant, which has read-only memory assigned to it by the compiler.

You could imagine the code is working internally like this

Code:

#include <stdio.h>

static const char STRING_LITERAL_1[] = "Hello";
static const char STRING_LITERAL_2[] = "World!!!!!!!!";

int main(void)
{
    char * buf;
    buf = (char*)STRING_LITERAL_1;
    printf("%s\n", buf);
 
    buf = (char*)STRING_LITERAL_2;
    printf("%s\n", buf);
 
    return 0;
}

The static char buffers, as well as the "..." literals are all initialized at compile time. When you say buf = STRING_LITERAL_1 or buf = "..." then the address of that memory is assigned.

Originally Posted by Ducky

I thought we needed to allocate memory before assigning a value to a char*

Code:

    buf = "Hello";

In the code snipped above, the string "Hello" is allocated a slot in your binary. The compiler does this when it compiles your program so you can refer to it later. Essentially this is allocating memory, but it's not being dynamically allocated - it's statically allocated, so the string exists throughout the lifetime of your program.

Ah, Ok I get it now. Thanks.