[RESOLVED] String to Char *

Hi group,

Apologies, I am not a C++ programmer and do not understand the intricacies of pointers!

I have a vb.net project (vb2005) which needs to call a C++ class module which I have added to the project. The C++ module accepts as input a char * variable, which has no equivalent in vb. On the vb side the variable is a string. I have successfully added and tested simple C++ calls and they all work fine, but I cannot get this to work, best I can do is to get vb to think its of type SByte.

I'm told that in .Net all data types are compatible at some level. I need to somehow represent a string as char * in vb, or a char pointer as string in C++, but don't know how to do it or the best way to go about it.

Basically I need to modify the C++ code to accept a string in the Public method and then internally to convert it to a char pointer, but don't know how to do it, not even sure what the string equivalent in C++ is.

Thanks in advance...

You can convert string to LPTSTR (or TCHAR) using LPCSTR operator:

Code:

---

        CString csTest(_T("Testt String"));

        LPTSTR lpszBuff = (LPTSTR)(LPCTSTR)csTest;
        TCHAR* pszBuff =  (LPTSTR)(LPCTSTR)csTest;

---

But I think it will be more feasible to pass BSTR (_bstr_t) or VARIANT (_variant_t)
Code snippet uses generic text mapping working for both: UNICODE and ASCII.

See this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/187912

Thanks very much for both your responses, its cleared it up for me!