Originally Posted by saishn

I get a segfault when I run the following. Seems to fail at strcpy.

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#include <cstring>
using std::strcpy;
 
int main()
{
    char * word = "word";
    strcpy(word, "what");
}

#include <cstring> using std::strcpy; int main() { char * word = "word"; strcpy(word, "what"); }

If I change char * word to char word[], it's fine. I thought that both declarations effectively do the same thing. What am I missing?

Thanks in advance.

Originally Posted by Bench

They both do nearly the same thing. The version with a char * word = "word"; creates a pointer to the string literal "word". You cannot assign anything to a literal, since a literal is constant.
eg, try compiling a program containing the line 5=7; and you'll get an error.

wheras the version with char word[] = "word"; creates an array of 5 characters in memory; 'w', 'o', 'r', 'd', '\0' . since the array is an object rather than a literal, its contents may be changed.

Originally Posted by saishn

While, the char * word points to the location where the literal "word" is stored and it's unmodifiable?

Originally Posted by saishn

They should issue a compile error saying that I have to make a pointer to const data to make the assignment then.