Professional C++, 5th Edition

2Working with Strings and String Views

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• The differences between C-style strings and C++ strings
• Details of the C++ std::string class
• Why you should use std::string_view
• What raw string literals are
• How to format strings

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Every program that you write will use strings of some kind. With the old C language, there is not much choice but to use a dumb null-terminated character array to represent a string. Unfortunately, doing so can cause a lot of problems, such as buffer overflows, which can result in security vulnerabilities. The C++ Standard Library includes a safe and easy-to-use std::string class that does not have these disadvantages.

Because strings are so important, this chapter, early in the book, discusses them in more detail.

DYNAMIC STRINGS

Strings in languages that have supported them as first-class objects tend to have a number of attractive features, such as being able to expand to any size or to have substrings extracted or replaced. In other languages, such as C, strings were almost an afterthought; there was no really good string data type, just fixed arrays of bytes. The C string library was nothing more than a collection of rather primitive functions without even bounds checking. C++ provides a string ...