Thread: Question about memory address

Hi I have another question. I was reading my tutorial and there's a sample program to count the number of characters an user entered with a pointer array.

Code:

// Ex3_10.cpp
// Counting string characters using a pointer
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
   const int MAX = 80;                 // Maximum array dimension
   char buffer[MAX];                   // Input buffer
   char* pbuffer=buffer;               // Pointer to array buffer
   cout << endl                        // Prompt for input
        << "Enter a string of less than "
        << MAX << " characters:"
        << endl;
   cin.getline(buffer, MAX, '\n');     // Read a string until \n

   while(*pbuffer)                     // Continue until \0
      pbuffer++;

   cout << endl
        << "The string \"" << buffer
        << "\" has " << pbuffer-buffer  << " characters.";

   cout << endl;
   return 0;
}

What I don't get is the bolded part, pbuffer-buffer. How does that output the number of characters? Wouldn't that show the bytes of memory the string takes up since they point to memory address?
Thanks in advance for whoever answers this.

A char is equal to 1 byte always.

WRONG! (Sorry, manofsteel972)

The language standard requires that a char hold at least one byte (8 bits).

Actually, this has to do with Pointer Arithmetic. This is a feature of the language that lets you, for example, incriment pointers without worrying about the size-of the object being pointed-to.

The language standard requires that a char hold at least one byte (8 bits).

That may be what the standard says, but how exactly the compiler implements the standard is... well.... compiler specific. Most compilers that I know of use 1 byte and 1 byte only.