C++ String to Double (strtod) function notes

As part of my ongoing exercise to write calculator in C++ I wanted to add capability of using memory content as parameter, e.g. add mem to current value.

Although I quickly determined that one solution was strtod function I had problems getting it to work until I read GID Forum at http://www.gidforums.com/t-1131.html.

I have cut and pasted relevent section here.

Garth Farley Invalid Email Address

Join Date: May 2002 Location: Ireland Posts: 638

The problem is that strtod() is a function that has been around since the original C. C didn't have strings as we know it (a class which contains the characters), instead strings were character arrays, with the end being denoted by the a NULL terminator (\0).

So, in plain C, to get a string, you'd have

char[] word = {'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\0'};

These were pretty dodgy, since the only way to know the end of a string was to see the NULL character at the end. If the \0 is overwritten (and it can happen pretty easily), then the memory is continually read until a NULL character is found, getting a load of rubbish along the way. And writing to this would overwrite memory needed elsewhere, crashing all.

C++ improved this drastically, with the string class, which stores the length of the string along with a character array - so it doesn't rely on a NULL character.

However (getting back to the point), strtod() function only can accept C style strings, i.e. character arrays. You can convert a C++ string to a C string using a method of the string class, c_str().

word.c_str() - returns a character array with a NULL at the end.

So to answer your question, the syntax to get that working is:

CPP / C++ / C Code:

n1=strtod( t1.c_str() );