How to get the real and total length of char * (char array)?

Question

For a char [], I can easily get its length by:

char a[] = \"aaaaa\";
int length = sizeof(a)/sizeof(char); // length=6

However,

Answer 1

char *a = new char[10];

My question is that how can I get the length of a char *

It is very simply.:) It is enough to add only one statement

size_t N = 10;
char *a = new char[N];

Now you can get the size of the allocated array

std::cout << "The size is " << N << std::endl;

Many mentioned here C standard function std::strlen. But it does not return the actual size of a character array. It returns only the size of stored string literal.

The difference is the following. if to take your code snippet as an example

char a[] = "aaaaa";
int length = sizeof(a)/sizeof(char); // length=6

then std::strlen( a ) will return 5 instead of 6 as in your code.

So the conclusion is simple: if you need to dynamically allocate a character array consider usage of class std::string. It has methof size and its synonym length that allows to get the size of the array at any time.

For example

std::string s( "aaaaa" );

std::cout << s.length() << std::endl;

or

std::string s;
s.resize( 10 );

std::cout << s.length() << std::endl;