Is it safe to overload char* and std::string?

Question

I have just read about the overloading functions on a beginner book. Just out of curiosity I \'d like to ask whether it is safe to overload between char* and std::string.

Answer 1

Yes, it's safe, as long as you make it const char*, and actually often useful. String literals cannot be converted to char* since C++11 (and it was deprecated before that).

The const char* overload will be picked for a string literal because a string literal is a const char[N] (where N is the number of characters). Overloads have a kind of priority ordering over which one will be picked when multiple would work. It's considered a better match to perform array-to-pointer conversion than to construct a std::string.

Why can overloading std::string and const char* be useful? If you had, for example, one overload for std::string and one for an bool, the bool would get called when you passed a string literal. That's because the bool overload is still considered a better match than constructing a std::string. We can get around this by providing a const char* overload, which will beat the bool overload, and can just forward to the std::string overload.