Why is an empty string literal treated as true?

Question

Why is the condition in this code true?

int main ( )
{

   if (\"\")
      cout << \"hello\"; // executes!

   return 0;
}
         


        

Answer 1

You are probably coming from a languange like PHP, where the check is processed different:

 php -r 'echo "X";if ("") echo "Y";'

THis will print the X, but not the Y because the empty string has no value.

As others have pointed out, in C++ it's a non-null-pointer, so evaluated as true.