Question

Which is your favorite way to go with strings in C++? A C-style array of chars? Or wchar_t? CString, std::basic_string, std::string, BSTR or CComBSTR?

Certainly each of these has its own area of application, but anyway, which is your favorite and why?

Answer 1

std::string or std::wstring, depending on your needs. Why?

• They’re standard
• They’re portable
• They can handle I18N
• They have performance guarantees (as per the standard)
• Protected against buffer overflows and similar attacks
• Are easily converted to other types as needed
• Are nicely templated, giving you a wide variety of options while reducing code bloat and improving performance. Really. Compilers that can’t handle templates are long gone now.

A C-style array of chars is just asking for trouble. You’ll still need to deal with them on occasion (and that’s what std::string.c_str() is for), but, honestly — one of the biggest dangers in C is programmers doing Bad Things with char* and winding up with buffer overflows. Just don’t do it.

An array of wchar__t is the same thing, just bigger.

CString, BSTR, and CComBSTR are not standard and not portable. Avoid them unless absolutely forced. Optimally, just convert a std::string/std::wstring to them when needed, which shouldn’t be very expensive.

Note that std::string is just a child of std::basic_string, but you’re still better off using std::string unless you have a really good reason not to. Really Good. Let the compiler take care of the optimization in this situation.