How to use string functions with winapi?

[AceDawg45]

So, I am making a program (in win32) that picks an episode of a TV show randomly. I want to make a function string EpisodePicker() that will pick the episode, and call it when the user clicks a button. I would like a function that returns a word, basically. How would I do that?

[codewalker]

Exactly like you posted have a function returning std::string

something like

std::string EpisodePicker()
{
    //some code 
    std::string episode = "Clone Wars 2-4"; //implement your logic to pick this
    //some other code
    return episode;
}

[AceDawg45]

Oh, yeah, thank you. But I figured it out. I was trying to use CreateWindow() to show static text on the screen, and I just made the EpisodePicker() function to return a LPSTR, which is the parameter for the window name. Thank you anyway.

[freddie1]

You can keep confusion at bay by always remembering that the WinApi functions all take pointers to null terminated strings as parameters, not string objects, as in Std C++ Lib String Class or wstring. Its of course convenient to perform string manipulations on string objects, but in passing one to a WinApi function you need to use the string::c_str() method. When retrieving a string pointer from a WinApi function, assigning it to a std::string will give you something you can perhaps more easily work with.