CString to char*

Question

We are using the CString class throughout most of our code. However sometimes we need to convert to a char *. at the moment we have been doing this using variable.GetBuffer(

Answer 1

If your functions only require reading the string and not modifying it, change them to accept const char * instead of char *. The CString will automatically convert for you, this is how most of the MFC functions work and it's really handy. (Actually MFC uses LPCTSTR, which is a synonym for const TCHAR * - works for both MBC and Unicode builds).

If you need to modify the string, GetBuffer(0) is very dangerous - it won't necessarily allocate enough memory for the resulting string, and you could get some buffer overrun errors.

As has been mentioned by others, you need to use ReleaseBuffer after GetBuffer. You don't need to do that for the conversion to const char *.