Question

Many windows APIs take a pointer to a buffer and a size element but the result needs to go into a c++ string. (I’m using windows unicode here so they are wstrings)

Here is an example :-

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <vector>
#include <windows.h>

using namespace std;

// This is the method I'm interested in improving ...
wstring getComputerName()
{
    vector<wchar_t> buffer;
    buffer.resize(MAX_COMPUTERNAME_LENGTH+1);
    DWORD size = MAX_COMPUTERNAME_LENGTH;

    GetComputerNameW(&buffer[0], &size);

    return wstring(&buffer[0], size);
}

int main()
{
    wcout << getComputerName() << "\n";
}

My question really is, is this the best way to write the getComputerName function so that it fits into C++ better, or is there a better way? I don’t see any way to use a string directly without going via a vector unless I missed something? It works fine, but somehow seems a little ugly. The question isn’t about that particular API, it’s just a convenient example.

Answer 1

In this case, I don’t see what std::vector brings to the party. MAX_COMPUTERNAME_LENGTH is not likely to be very large, so I would simply use a C-style array as the temporary buffer.