Question

I have learned that a pointer points to a memory address so i can use it to alter the value set at that address. So like this:

int *pPointer = &iTuna;

pPointer here has the memory address of iTuna. So we can use pPointer to alter the value at iTuna. If I print pPointer the memory address gets printed and if I print *pPointer then the value at iTuna gets printed

Now see this program

    char* pStr= "Hello !";
cout<< pStr << endl;
cout<< *pStr << endl;
system("PAUSE");
return 0;

There are a lot of stuff I don’t understand here:

1. In “Hello !” Each letter is stored separately, and a pointer holds one memory address. So how does pStr point to all the letters.

2. Also When I print out pStr it prints Hello !, not a memory address.

3. And when I print out *pStr it prints out H only not all what pStr is pointing too.

I really can’t understand and these are my concerns. I hope someone can explain to me how this works ad help me understand

Answer 1

1. "Hello !" is an array of type char const[8] and value { 'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', ' ', '!', 0 }. pStr is a pointer to its first element; its last element has the value 0.

2. There is an overload in the iostreams library for a char const * argument, which treats the ar­gu­ment as a pointer to the first element of an array and prints every element until it encounters a zero. (“Null-ter­mi­nat­ed string” in colloquial parlance.)

3. Dereferencing the pointer to the first element of an array gives you the first element of the array, i.e. 'H'. This identical to pStr[0].