Type of a C++ string literal

Question

Out of curiosity, I\'m wondering what the real underlying type of a C++ string literal is.

Depending on what I observe, I get different results.

A typeid tes

Answer 1

The type of a string literal is indeed const char[SIZE] where SIZE is the length of the string plus the null terminating character.

The fact that you're sometimes seeing const char* is because of the usual array-to-pointer decay.

But I don't see how it could be const char * as the following line is accepted by VS12: char* s = "Hello";

This was correct behaviour in C++03 (as an exception to the usual const-correctness rules) but it has been deprecated since. A C++11 compliant compiler should not accept that code.