help with const char's and string literals!

[theredchaser]

I am completely stuck in comprehending Sections [10.2] String Literals revisited and [10.3] Initializing arrays of character pointers in Accelerated C++...

Suppose I have an int array and char array:

int intArray[] = {1,2,3,4,5};
char charArray[] = {'h','e','l','l','o','\0'};

by default, the array returns the memory location of the first element, so:

cout << intArray // memory address of first element
cout << *intArray // dereferenced memory address of first element; 1 

BUT when you do it with the character array, its not the same:

cout << charArray // hello
cout << *charArray // h 

I know that the string literal "hello" is the same thing as a char array with a null character added to the end. Does that have anything to do with why charArray returns hello?


EDIT/UPDATE:

I tried searching using different words and I got this thread:

http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/beginner/53823/

This seems to imply that character arrays are treated differently than all other types of arrays for their return value, yet still are the same for their dereferenced return value?

EDIT/UPDATE 2:

I guess I might as well post my follow-up question while I'm at it. It was actually this part that completely blows me away:

char *p_Char = "this is a string literal";

What is going on here? It seems to me like its trying to cram a string literal into a char, yet the compiler only gives me this message:

"Conversion from string literal to 'char *' is deprecated

To make things more confusing, slapping a const in front of it makes the warning go away. ??? I thought const was just to let the compiler know that the values won't be changed?

when I cout the p_Char as is, then for some reason it returns the entire string literal. When I cout *p_Char, it returns the first character, which makes more sense to me since a dereferenced character pointer should return a character.

Please help me out since I've been stuck on this part for the last 3 days and I can't figure it out!

[Peter87]

It's not that char arrays are different. It's just that the operator<< is overloaded for char* to work in this way. It is very convenient that it works that way because if it didn't then std::cout << "hello"; would print a memory address instead of printing "hello".


char *p_Char = "this is a string literal";
What happens here is that "this is a string literal" gives you a char array of size 25. As you know an array decays to a pointer to the first element in the array in many cases. That is what happens here. p_Char will point to the first element in the array. The array is actually read-only so you should have used const. That's why you got the warning (In C++11 it's an error).