While the previously mentioned String class (note the uppercase S), is a good thing for people coming from Java, then you should take notice of the "real" string class provided by The Standard C++ Library.

The string class was made to overcome one of the greatest pitfalls in C; character arrays. While character arrays are extremely fast, they have many bad sides. Character arrays are the cause of many bugs, and parsing character arrays is very time consuming.

The string class brings a good interface for parsing and handling strings, and it's even STL compatible, so it can be used with all the general STL algorithms. Actually you could say that a string is a vector<char>. A container of chars, or an advanced array of chars.



Keywords: The Standard C++ Library,STL compatible,The string class ,character arrays,general STL algorithms,greatest pitfalls in C