Do you know how to access c-style literal strings? Try this two-part quiz and see if you are able to unravel the different semantics of character pointers and arrays.
Question:
a) What is wrong, if anything, with the following code?
char * p = "foobar";
b) How do these 2 lines of code differ?
char const * p = "foobar"; char const s[] = "foobar";
Answer:
a) Since a literal string decays to a pointer type of char const * and NOT char * this is not strictly speaking legal C++; however, to maintain backwards compatibility with C, compilers will allow this but they (should) produce a warning since this construct is now deprecated in C++ and will be removed from future versions of the standard.
b) Line one is a pointer to a literal string, which is immutable and attempting to modify the string will result in undefined behaviour. Line two is an array that is initialised with a string value, which means you are allowed to remove the const specifier and modify the array if you so wish (since you own the memory that represents the array).
