Re: CString to const char*

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NickP wrote:
>>Also, never cast unless you exactly know what you are doing.

That's the whole point of trial and error, I've been programming for
quite a few years now, that comment wasn't particularly necessary to be
honest.

Sorry, I didn't intend to sound arrogant or patronizing. The thing I wanted
to express is that only very, very few cases require a cast and only very
very few of those require a C style cast. Most conversions in fact happen
automatically, and if not, the compiler usually has a good reason. Adding
casts might silence the compiler easily, but, as you saw yourself when
casting wchar_t* to char*, the result is often just wrong.

>>Define 'better' before making such statements.

Well if you are going to be pedantic about it, don't worry.

No, what I meant was that depending on the context, either might be the
better choice. I use both CString and std::string/std::wstring here,
depending on whether I'm working in an MFC environment or in portable C++
code.

Since you mentioned gethostbyname, I'd go and take CStringA. In particular
the GetBufferSetLength(), giving you a mutable buffer, makes it a slightly
better choice for interfacing with such C style APIs.

Otherwise, CString (the TCHAR based version) also has a constructor that
takes a char*, so you can use plain char strings with gethostbyname and
have CString automatically convert them to TCHAR. However, the other way
round is not as easy, which I first thought was your goal.

Uli

.

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