How do you reverse a string in place in C or C++?

Question

How do you reverse a string in C or C++ without requiring a separate buffer to hold the reversed string?

Answer 1

In the interest of completeness, it should be pointed out that there are representations of strings on various platforms in which the number of bytes per character varies depending on the character. Old-school programmers would refer to this as DBCS (Double Byte Character Set). Modern programmers more commonly encounter this in UTF-8 (as well as UTF-16 and others). There are other such encodings as well.

In any of these variable-width encoding schemes, the simple algorithms posted here (evil, non-evil or otherwise) would not work correctly at all! In fact, they could even cause the string to become illegible or even an illegal string in that encoding scheme. See Juan Pablo Califano's answer for some good examples.

std::reverse() potentially would still work in this case, as long as your platform's implementation of the Standard C++ Library (in particular, string iterators) properly took this into account.