Question

I am currently making a small C++ tool , and I am kind of shocked on the way of How to deal with strings in C++. This is the first time i need to deal with C++ , I have pretty much experience with Managed languages with strong types like Java , C# but I am getting mad with C++ strings.

Are there any best practices to work with strings in C++ ?

A lot of WIN API functions dealing with different type of “strings”

tchar , char* , LPWSTR , LPCSTR … etc.
and converting each type to other is taking a lot of time for me to implement.

Please suggest your way of dealing with strings when converting one type to another.
Maybe there is some library to use ?

Answer 1

Short answer? Use std::string or std::wstring wherever you can is my advice.

std::string strBuffer = "test";
strBuffer += " ... test";
std::string::size_type nStringSize = strBuffer.size();
const char* pszString = strBuffer.c_str();    // pszString contains 
                                              // pointer to memory held 
                                              // by STL string and can be 
                                              // passed into API calls

You can easily obtain a “c style” string (i.e. a pointer to a null terminate char array char* by .c_str() which you can pass into most WinAPI functions as is.

Most of the other types you mention (tchar, LPWSTR, LPCSTR etc) are typedefs to C style arrays (or pointers to C style arrays, or char types) for supporting unicode over multibyte character sets.