what does “const char(&a)[N]” mean?

Question

I was checking the C++11 features and see the following codes:

class conststr {
    const char* p;
    std::size_t sz;
public:
    template

        

Answer 1

It's a reference to array of const char of size N. This is probably used to accept a string literal as argument.

conststr("whatever"); // ok
char const * psz_whatever("whatever");
conststr(psz_whatever); // error