What is the most efficient way to store a char pointer into a string in C++

Question

What is the most effective way to store a char pointer into a string in C++?

Answer 1

The std::string class has an appropriate constructor that takes a const char * argument:

const char *p = "hello world";
std::string s = std::string(p);
std::cout << s << std::endl;

That will print

hello world

Answer 2

Basically one of the string constructors is

string (const char* s);

which builds a string using a constant character pointer. This means that you can implicit cast a const char* to string like

const char* cstr = "Hello, World!";
std::string cppStr = cstr;

Any try to implicitly or explicitly cast a const char* to std::string is viable; for instance

cppStr = cppStr + cstr;

Or you could just call the constructor and pass the parameters

std::string cppstr2 {cstr};

If you have a constexpr it would be a string literal and most compilers convert string literal into std::string at compile time making its time complexity constant. However converting a constant pointer or a conventional c_string to a std::string takes linear time.

More info on std::string