Scope of (string) literals

Question

I always try to avoid to return string literals, because I fear they aren\'t defined outside of the function. But I\'m not sure if this is the case. Let\'s take, for example

Answer 1

It's really important to make note of the undefined results that Brian mentioned. Since you have declared the function as returning a const char * type, you should be okay, but on many platforms string literals are placed into a read-only segment in the executable (usually the text segment) and modifying them will cause an access violation on most platforms.