Question

I am getting an error when I run this piece of code

  string line;
  getline (myfile,line);
  char file_input[15];
  strncpy(file_input, line, 6);
  cout << line << endl;

Error – cannot convert ‘std::string’ to ‘const char*’ for argument ‘2’ to ‘char* strncpy(char*, const char*, size_t)’
How to get rid of this?

Answer 1

strncpy(file_input, line.c_str(), 6);

But why would you want the fixed-length buffer file_input in the first place? It would be safer to construct it as a new std::string containing the first five characters in line:

std::string file_input(line, 0, 5);