Thread: Casting *string to *char legal?

Hey,
I have some code where I explicitly case a string pointer to a char pointer.
It compiles fine with this, but I want to know if it really works or if it changes things.
If I do this, will I lose what the string pointer was pointing at before it was cast to a char pointer?

EDIT: What was I possibly thinking...?? I can just call up string::c_str(). Must be getting too tired. Its getting pretty late here.

Actually I just encountered this and it does work but I don't prefer to do it. The main reason is because from the code or from a header one could not deduce that a const char * could be passed in or should be passed in.

Caller:

Code:

...
const char *pText = "test";
Foo(pText);
...
...
void Foo(const std::string &text)
{
     std::cout << text.c_str() << std::endl;
}

Believe it or not but due to conversion operators in std::string this code actually works and compiles. It's extremely ugly but it is one way to get around DLL issues with using STL strings in interface functions. If you just pass in const char * from the client of the DLL it works. It also works correctly since the conversion is done in the DLL and uses the STL version in the DLL. In fact there is no way to get an STL version mistmatch.

However, as I said, this is not clearly communicated from the interface (IE: Foo() at first glance seems to require const std::string& - it isn't clear that const char * will work).
I just tested this code in 2005 in a single project console app and it worked fine. I did not test it with Foo() being in a DLL but I know it works b/c I ran into at my job.
So yes it does work but I do not recommend doing it this way unless you have to....like if you would have to modify many many DLL interfaces to use const char * instead of const std::string& then it might be useful but only if it was well documented.

Bubba you did something completely different. You implicitly constructed a temporary string object from a const char*.
The OP on the other hand talks of directly casting a pointer to a string to a pointer to char I.e.:

Code:

string *a = new string("Hello");
char *b = (char*)a;
cout << b;

As he later realises, this is clearly a blunder and will not work.

Curiously enough, it probably will sometimes work on VC++, and probably a number of other implementations. Specifically, all those that use small-buffer-optimization and have the small buffer at the start of their object. It will work whenever the string is in the SB. It's the ideal tester's nightmare: the short strings that those quick tests use will work, but the real-world use case that uses longer strings fails.

I think it helped me having a bit more background on some of the previous threads from this poster. Without having read them it's somewhat easy to skim over that post and assume he meant what you had thought.