What is the difference and the relationship of char and CString [duplicate]

Question

Can someone explain me the difference and the relationship between the char * and CString?... Thanks.

Answer 1

There are few important differences.

char * is a pointer to char. Generally you can't say if it a single char, or a beginning of a string, and what is the length. All those things are dictated by program logic and some conventions, i.e. standard C functions, like to use const char * as inputs. You need to manage memory allocated for strings manually.

CString is a macro. Depending on your program compilation options, it can be defined to either the CStringA or CStringW class. There are differences and similarities.

The difference is that CStringAoperates with non-Unicode data (similar to char*), and CStringW is a Unicode string (similar to wchar_t*).

Both classes, however, are equivalent in the aspect of string manipulation and storage management. They are closer to the standard C++ std::string and std::wstring classes.

Apart from that, both CStringA and CStringW provide the capability to convert strings to and from Unicode form.