Question

I am reading Accelerated C++ by Koenig. He writes that “the new idea is that we can use + to concatenate a string and a string literal – or, for that matter, two strings (but not two string literals).

Fine, this makes sense I suppose. Now onto two separate exercises meant to illuminate this .

Are the following definitions valid?

const string hello = "Hello";

const string message = hello + ",world" + "!";

Now, I tried to execute the above and it worked! So I was happy.

Then I tried to do the next exercise;

const string exclam = "!";

const string message = "Hello" + ",world" + exclam;

This did not work. Now I understand it has something to do with the fact that you cannot concatenate two string literals, but I don’t understand the semantic difference between why I managed to get the first example to work (isn’t “,world” and “!” two string literals? Shouldn’t this not have worked?) but not the second.

Answer 1

const string message = "Hello" + ",world" + exclam;

The + operator has left-to-right associativity, so the equivalent parenthesized expression is:

const string message = (("Hello" + ",world") + exclam);

As you can see, the two string literals "Hello" and ",world" are “added” first, hence the error.

One of the first two strings being concatenated must be a std::string object:

const string message = string("Hello") + ",world" + exclam;

Alternatively, you can force the second + to be evaluated first by parenthesizing that part of the expression:

const string message = "Hello" + (",world" + exclam);

It makes sense that your first example (hello + ",world" + "!") works because the std::string (hello) is one of the arguments to the leftmost +. That + is evaluated, the result is a std::string object with the concatenated string, and that resulting std::string is then concatenated with the "!".

---

As for why you can’t concatenate two string literals using +, it is because a string literal is just an array of characters (a const char [N] where N is the length of the string plus one, for the null terminator). When you use an array in most contexts, it is converted into a pointer to its initial element.

So, when you try to do "Hello" + ",world", what you’re really trying to do is add two const char*s together, which isn’t possible (what would it mean to add two pointers together?) and if it was it wouldn’t do what you wanted it to do.

---

Note that you can concatenate string literals by placing them next to each other; for example, the following two are equivalent:

"Hello" ",world"
"Hello,world"

This is useful if you have a long string literal that you want to break up onto multiple lines. They have to be string literals, though: this won’t work with const char* pointers or const char[N] arrays.