How to inspect std::string in GDB with no source code?

Question

I\'m trying to debug a program that has no source code available, and I need to look at what it has stored in a std::string. I\'ve been Googling and looking on here, and I\'

Answer 1

Every std::string implementation has a pointer to the raw characters in it somewhere. For g++ 4.x, that pointer is at offset 0 into the string.

If you know that the string resides at e.g. 0x7fffffffda88, then

print *(char**)0x7fffffffda88

is what you need.