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

Your function is returning garbage because you're returning the address of a local variable which goes out of scope after your function returns. It should probably look like this:

char* str2char(const std::string &str)
{
    char *const cset = new char[str.size() + 1]; // +1 for the null character
    strcpy(cset, str.c_str());
    return cset;
}

You will need to delete your variable r by doing delete[] r;. Ideally though you wouldn't be using raw pointers, and you would use std::string for everything, or wrap the char * in a std::unique_ptr.