ofstream constructor with std::string

[Alrededor]

I wrote some code and made a programming mistake, but it still worked. Later, when looking over the code I said to myself, "That shouldn't have compiled!".

I am running Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express.

Consider the following minimal code:

#include <fstream>
#include<string>

int main()
{
    std::string filespec = "D:/Temp/Test.txt";
    std::ofstream outFile( filespec );

    outFile << "Hello, World!\n";

    outFile.close();
}

The ofstream constructor should have been std::ofstream outFile( filespec.c_str() );

A std::string will also work with ofstream open() method.

Microsoft's documentation does not show this, either for the constructor or the open method. Nor is it listed as a language extension.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y1et11xw%28v=vs.100%29.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kexhtshc%28v=vs.100%29.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/34h23df8%28v=vs.100%29.aspx

For the open() method Intellisense shows eight methods including const std::string& and const std::wstring&.

I couldn't make Intellisense show me the available constructors, but clearly a constructor with const std::string exists.

I am not a professional programmer and don't have access to the C++ Standard.
Is this non-standard behavior or is this perhaps part of new Standard. I believe I would get compile time errors with VS C++ 2008 Express if I accidently passed a string instead of a char* as a parameter. Any comments?

[Hippogriff]

I haven't look through all of the documentation of it so I can't tell you exactly where this is listed, but yes this was a new addition for C++11 (about time for this too).

This would not work on VS 2008 but no problems on VS 2010 as you saw.

[Alrededor]

Thanks for the response.