const char* concatenation

Question

I need to concatenate two const chars like these:

const char *one = \"Hello \";
const char *two = \"World\";

How might I go about doing tha

Answer 1

In your example one and two are char pointers, pointing to char constants. You cannot change the char constants pointed to by these pointers. So anything like:

strcat(one,two); // append string two to string one.

will not work. Instead you should have a separate variable(char array) to hold the result. Something like this:

char result[100];   // array to hold the result.

strcpy(result,one); // copy string one into the result.
strcat(result,two); // append string two to the result.

Answer 2

The C way:

char buf[100];
strcpy(buf, one);
strcat(buf, two);

The C++ way:

std::string buf(one);
buf.append(two);

The compile-time way:

#define one "hello "
#define two "world"
#define concat(first, second) first second

const char* buf = concat(one, two);

Answer 3

If you don't know the size of the strings, you can do something like this:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(){
    const char* q1 = "First String";
    const char* q2 = " Second String";

    char * qq = (char*) malloc((strlen(q1)+ strlen(q2))*sizeof(char));
    strcpy(qq,q1);
    strcat(qq,q2);

    printf("%s\n",qq);

    return 0;
}

Answer 4

It seems like you're using C++ with a C library and therefore you need to work with const char *.

I suggest wrapping those const char * into std::string:

const char *a = "hello "; 
const char *b = "world"; 
std::string c = a; 
std::string d = b; 
cout << c + d;

Answer 5

You can use strstream. It's formally deprecated, but it's still a great tool if you need to work with C strings, i think.

char result[100]; // max size 100
std::ostrstream s(result, sizeof result - 1);

s << one << two << std::ends;
result[99] = '\0';

This will write one and then two into the stream, and append a terminating \0 using std::ends. In case both strings could end up writing exactly 99 characters - so no space would be left writing \0 - we write one manually at the last position.

Answer 6

const char* one = "one";
const char* two = "two";
char result[40];
sprintf(result, "%s%s", one, two);