Char length

strlen(string); I think works. You could also just loop through the string count the number of characters before the null terminator (assuming its a null terminated string).

How long is a piece of string, anyway?

The pointer has no length in and of itself; the "string length" you're talking about is defined by convention ("read through memory until the first \0 character, and that's the end"). Of course, there is a legacy function call left over from C that looks after that for you (strlen()), but why are you messing around with this kind of stuff?

std::string foo; // an object, not just a pointercin >> foo; // one wordgetline(cin, foo); // one linefoo.length(); // length of the string, which is a real "string"foo += "bar"; // much more readable than the C equivalent, and probably faster too// (the string implementation will cache the string length, while raw C-style// "strings" have no such concept; the runtime must look up the null terminator// every time)

Quote:

Original post by hungryhippo5000 char* string; cin >> string;

Access violation, you would need to allocate a buffer first. But then you don't know how big it has to be.

One should never use cin >> charpointer. It's a sure buffer overflow bug.

Since your using C++, you should probably consider using std::string.

If you're using std::string then string.length() would work. But if you're using char* you can simply use the age old strlen(char*); which I think resides in #include (not sure though)

Or #include , but you'd need to allocate enough memory for the character array before reading it.

ToohrVyk, head of the CRCSCCA (committee for renaming C strings to C character arrays)