I used to use the c-style method of working with strings and such, but always had a hard time. So I started using the cstring header and using the string class. It's alot easier with the overloaded operators and such. However, I use Win32 API to do all my work mostly, and most of the API functions take in (const char*) or similar. When replacing what I had in the functions with strings, I ended up using (LPSTR)var.c_str() to make the code compile. Well, as expected, it compiled, but also expected, the program crashes because of it. Is there a technique or method with using strings in the Win32 API? Other APIs (Winsock, OpenGL, etc)? Thanks for any information.