Question

I wrote a function which returns the current date. Inside the function, I “cout” the result and it work but when I “cout” the function, it does not work. I got garbage.

const char* engineCS::getDate() const
{
    time_t t = time(0);
    struct tm *now = localtime(&t);
    char buf[20];
    strftime(buf, sizeof(buf), "%Y-%m-%d %X", now);
    cout << buf << endl;
    return buf;
}

Exemple :
Inside : 2012-02-02 00:00:00
Outside : ?????fv

What is wrong?
Similar problem : Functions and return const char*

THX

Edit:
What is wrong now? Sorry I’ve done too much VB.NET…

const char* engineCS::getDate() const
{
    time_t t = time(0);
    struct tm *now = localtime(&t);
    char *buf;
    buf = new char[20];
    strftime(buf, sizeof(buf), "%Y-%m-%d %X", now);
    cout << buf << endl;
    return buf;
}

Answer 1

Change your function to return std::string, and everything will be fine. You won’t need to make any further changes apart from the return type. If the consumer needs a raw char const *, call the c_str() member function on the resulting string.