Question

I have a function in a library that takes in a char* and modifies the data.

I tried to give it the c_str() but c++ docs say it returns a const char*.

What can I do other than newing a char array and copying it into that?

Answer 1

Nothing.

Because std::string manages itself its contents, you can’t have write access to the string’s underlying data. That’s undefined behavior.

However, creating and copying a char array is not hard:

std::string original("text");
std::vector<char> char_array(original.begin(), original.end());
char_array.push_back(0);

some_function(&char_array[0]);