Question

Assume I want to write my own string class. The string has a property char * s which is a pointer that points to a character.

Now in the constructor, String::String(), what would you pass in to assume another char * to that? You can’t really do something like the code below since both pointers will point to the same thing (and we don’t want that):

String::String(const char *str) {
        s = str;
}

Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

You need to deep copy the string, i.e. create a character buffer long enough to incorporate the contents of str, then copy the contents into it. The simplest way to achieve that would be using strdup strcpy, since the former is nonstandard:

s = new char[strlen (str) + 1];
if (s == NULL) throw some_exception;
strcpy (s, str);