Why does the number of elements in a initializer list cause an ambiguous call error?

Question

Why are the first two calls to doSomething OK by the compiler, but using two elements in the list causes an ambiguous call?

#include 

        

Answer 1

What is happening here is that in the two element initializer list both of the string literals can be implicitly converted to const char* since their type is const char[N]. Now std::vector has a constructor that takes two iterators which the pointers qualify for. Because of that the initializer_list constructor of the std::vector is conflicting with the iterator range constructor of std::vector.

If we change the code to instead be

doSomething({"hello"s, "stack"s});

Then the elements of the initializer list are now std::strings so there is no ambiguity.