Deallocating after c_str()?

[santih87]

Do I have to worry about deallocating the memory used by a string gotten by calling the c_str method from the string class?

for example,

1- string str("hey");
2- const char* cstr = str.c_str();
3- cstr = "abcd";

... after line #3 has been executed, what happened to the memory it was pointing to before?

[moorecm]

You might want to try compiling that...

[santih87]

I just did.... it compiles

[Peter87]

c_str() just returns pointer to the string's internal buffer so no need to clean up. Just be careful if you manipulate the string, pointers received from earlier calls to c_str() could be invalidated.

[santih87]

Gotcha!, Thanks Peter!