Why is my function returning garbage when it should return a char?

Question

I\'m a newbie in C++ learning the language and playing around. I wrote a piece of code which behavior I don\'t understand. Could someone explain why the code below prints ou

Answer 1

It's because you return a pointer to a local variable, a local variable that goes out of scope when the function returns.

You are already using std::string for the argument, use it instead of the array and the return pointer.