Question

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Modifying C string constants?
Pointer to const char vs char array vs std::string

I know I’m probably beating the dead horse with this question, but I’m a little confused and I haven’t managed to find an exact answer on SO or google (that I’m confident is right – there’s just too much information on C-strings to sift through). Also, I’ve tagged it C++ because that’s what I’m interested in, even though we’re talking about C-style strings specifically.

In this situation:

char const a*  = "hello";
char const b[] = "goodbye";

I would have thought that “hello” and “goodbye” were both immutable strings because they come from string-literals that should decay to a char const*.

I’ve seen that in this particular case though, changing “hello” would be undefined while changing “goodbye” would be fine, assuming you stripped the constness from the b-array.

I assume that the string is mutable in the case of b due to the fact that its stored in a user-defined array.

Are hello and goodbye different in this case? Is goodbye not a string-literal for some reason given this example. Also, if goodbye isn’t a string-literal, can I assume it isn’t held in global memory, and the only reference to it after compile time is that which is left in the user-array cells?

Answer 1

The first one creates a pointer that points to the string literal "hello", which is probably stored in non-writable memory in the executable image of the program. Even if it isn’t, you are not allowed to modify the contents of that array.

The second one creates an automatic array¹ (on the stack (usually, but that is implementation-defined)) and initialises it with the string "goodbye". It is equivalent to

char const b[] = {'g', 'o', 'o', 'd', 'b', 'y', 'e', 0};

So while "goodbye" is immutable because it is a string literal which is char const[8] and stored in non-writable memory, the array b is an automatic¹ array that is immutable because you marked it const, but you could remove the const from the variable declaration to make the array’s contents mutable. You are only initialising the contents of the array with the contents of the array "goodbye".

You are not allowed to modify either of them because they are both const char[], but the second one could be changed to char[] to be mutable, while the first one could not.

See this answer for more info: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9106798/726361

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¹ As R. Martinho Fernandes pointed out in the comments, the syntax T x[] = ... could also create a static array (not automatic but static (in the executable image usually, but that’s implementation defined)) if it is at namespace scope, and it’s only an automatic array otherwise.