CString to char*

Flaviu_ 1,031

I have a SDI unicode project. I was tried:

CString s(_T("ala bala portocala"));
char* c = (char*)(LPCTSTR)s;

but in c I have 'a' only. When I tried:

CString s(_T("ala bala portocala"));
char* c = s.GetBuffer(s.GetLength());
s.ReleaseBuffer();

I got:

error C2440: 'initializing' : cannot convert from 'wchar_t *' to 'char *'

How to do the right conversion ?

Barry Schwarz 3,746 Reputation points

2020-11-01T19:01:45.523+00:00

Based on the error message about wchar_t, you are apparently building in Unicode mode. Each character in CString s occupies two bytes. The two-byte representation of the normal one-byte ASCII characters includes a high order byte of 0. Thus your 'a' which is 0x61 in ASCII is 0x0061 in Unicode. Since you are on a little-endian machine, the first byte contains the 0x61 and the second contains the 0x00. When you access this data via the char* c, everything is processed as one-byte characters. The first byte contains the 0x61 which produces the 'a'. The second byte contains 0x00 which terminates the string.

The simplest solution is to change the type of c to wchar_t*. If, as you say in a later post, you cannot change the type of c, then you need to change your build environment to non-Unicode. That way, CString s would contain one-byte characters which can be processed with a char* c.

Accepted answer

Viorel 122.6K Reputation points

2020-11-01T09:18:06.687+00:00
If you do not want to modify the string, then try one of solutions:

CString s( _T( "ala bala portocala" ) ); CStringA s2( s ); const char* c = s2;

C becomes invalid when s2 is destroyed.
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Flaviu_ 1,031 Reputation points

2020-11-01T12:55:29.613+00:00

char* c is the original code, I don't know if I could changed as const.

RLWA32 49,551 Reputation points

2020-11-01T13:27:04.927+00:00

You can obtain a non-const pointer to the encapsulated C style string by calling the CStringA object's GetBuffer() function.
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