Pointer of a character in C++

Question

Going by the books, the first cout line should print me the address of the location where the char variable b is stored, which seems to be the case for the

Answer 1

There is a non-member overload operator<<(std::basic_ostream) for the const char* type, that doesn't write the address, but rather the (presumed) C-style string¹⁾. In your case, since you have assigned the address of a single character, there is no NUL terminator, and thus no valid C-style string. The code exhibits undefined behavior.

The behavior for int* is different, as there is no special handling for pointers to int, and the statement writes the address to the stream, as expected.

If you want to get the address of the character instead, use a static_cast:

std::cout << static_cast( c ) << std::endl;

---

¹⁾ A C-style string is a sequence of characters, terminated by a NUL character ('\0').