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Converting System::String to char *

By saherneklawy

The official way to convert a visual c++ System::String to a char * could be found here. Such strings are everywhere in windows forms applications.

A simpler way (for people who are used to using standard c\c++) to do the conversion is as follows:

void string2charPtr(String ^orig, char *&out)
{
int length = orig->Length;
out = new char[length+1];
for(int i=0;i<length;i++)
out[i] = (char) orig[i];
out[length] = '';
}

Please feel free to comment on the function above.

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This entry was posted on October 31, 2009 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Converting System::String to char *”

  1. Abdallah El Guindy Says:
    November 2, 2009 at 12:43 am | Reply

    If you don’t really want to change the C-string, you can use:

    String^ s;

    using namespace Runtime::InteropServices;
    const char* chars = (const char*)(Marshal::StringToHGlobalAnsi(s)).ToPointer();

  2. saherneklawy Says:
    November 2, 2009 at 12:48 am | Reply

    But this is not really straight forward to people who are used to standard c.
    It is definitely better than options Microsoft suggest, if it works across Visual Studio versions

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