Question

Given the following methods:

// Method 1
void add(const std::string& header, bool replace);

//Method 2
void add(const std::string& name, const std::string& value);

It would appear that the following code will end up calling method 1 instead of method 2:

something.add("Hello", "World");

I ended up creating another method that looks like this:

//Method 3
void MyClass::add(const char* name, const char* value) {
    add(std::string(name), std::string(value));
}

It worked. So it would seem that when a method accepts a “quoted string” it will match in the following order:

1. const char*
2. bool
3. std::string

Why would a quoted string be treated as a bool before a std::string? Is this the usual behavior? I have written a decent amount of code for this project and haven’t had any other issues with the wrong method signature being selected…

Answer 1

My guess is the conversion from pointer to bool is an implicit primitive type conversion, where the conversion to std::string requires the call of a constructor and the construction of a temporary.