Question

I have a method setValue(string& val) that I need to call for some default values.
I would like to call it like this:

setValue("");
setValue("random value");

but I get the following error with g++: no matching function to call setValue(const char [10])

any idea on how I can do this beside creating a temp string object ?
It works but I find it inconvenient:

string temp("random value");
setValue(temp);

Answer 1

The problem is that string& will not bind to temporary objects, only to non const named objects (non-const lvalues in the Standard language). You’ll have to name an object to pass to your function, as you do with the temp variable.

One workaround is to use a const reference to string and pass directly your string literal to it. This works because 1) string has a non-explicit constructor which accepts const char* 2) const char [10] will decay to const char*.