Thread: Writing my own string class.

I have a few questions about C-style strings. If I wanna change the string contained in my class as it is now I must make the pointer data point to another C-style string, but if I do this alot there will be plenty of static strings in memory. The problem with this is that, if I one day decide to make a chat program (or any other program in need of input) and my string keeps pointing to new data everytime I input something there will be a hugh waste of memory, wont it? I know about dynamic memory allocation using malloc/free or new/delete but still I will never know exactly how much input the program might receive.

Other situations I will have the same trouble is if I want to concatenate two strings or copy strings, then I will have to set dato to point elsewhere but the old information will still be in memory.

What I really want to know is if there is a good way to save memory in this case? My very unfinished string class looks as follows:

Code:

class Str
{
    private:

    char* data;
    int length;

    void set(char* text)
    {
        data = text;
        length = getlen();
    }

    int getlen()
    {
        if (data == NULL)
            return 0;

        int i = 0;

        while (*data++ != '\0')
            i++;

        return i;
    }

    public:

    Str()
    {
        data = NULL;
        length = 0;
    }

    Str(char* text)
    {
        set(text);
    }

    void operator=(char* text)
    {
        set(text);
    }

    int len()
    {
        return length;
    }
};