Question

I have done a search in google and been told this is impossible as I can only get a static char * from a string, so I am looking for an alternative.

Here is the situation:
I have a .txt file that contains a list of other .txt files and some numbers, this is done so the program can be added to without recompilation. I use an ifstream to read the filenames into a string.

The function that they are required for is expecting a char * not a string and apparently this conversion is impossible.

I have access to this function but it calls another function with the char * so I think im stuck using a char *.

Does anyone know of a work around or another way of doing this?

Answer 1

You can get a const char* to the string using c_str:

std::string str = "foo bar" ;
const char *ptr = str.c_str() ;

If you need just a char* you have to make a copy, e.g. doing:

char *cpy = new char[str.size()+1] ;
strcpy(cpy, str.c_str());