const char* reassignment

[MK27]

I've just realized that something I've always assumed is illegal might not be.

const char* s = "okay";
[...]
s = "something else";
[...]
s = "and so on";

Can you re-assign different string literals to a const char* this way?

[iMalc]

Yeah absolutely!

You would only not be able to do that if you declared s as:

const char*const s = "You're stuck with me";

[ledow]

The data *pointed at* by the pointer cannot be changed. But the data pointer can be changed to point to somewhere else.

Quite a common "gotcha", especially in functions that takes things like that as parameters. As iMalc says, if you declare both the pointer AND the data it points at as const, then it will fail as expected.

[MK27]

Huh. Well, good I guess, live and learn.

I understand the stuff about const pointer vs. const data. It just suddenly struck me that the literal itself might be compiled into the read-only data segment, and not stack (which would potentially take it out of scope). For whatever reason, I'd been thinking that only happened when a const char pointer is initialized with a literal.