Temporaries May Vanish Before You Expect
----------------------------------------
It is dangerous to use pointers or references to _portions_ of a
temporary object. The compiler may very well delete the object before
you expect it to, leaving a pointer to garbage. The most common place
where this problem crops up is in classes like string classes,
especially ones that define a conversion function to type `char *' or
`const char *'--which is one reason why the standard `string' class
requires you to call the `c_str' member function. However, any class
that returns a pointer to some internal structure is potentially
subject to this problem.
For example, a program may use a function `strfunc' that returns
`string' objects, and another function `charfunc' that operates on
pointers to `char':
string strfunc ();
void charfunc (const char *);
void
f ()
{
const char *p = strfunc().c_str();
...
charfunc (p);
...
charfunc (p);
}
In this situation, it may seem reasonable to save a pointer to the C
string returned by the `c_str' member function and use that rather than
call `c_str' repeatedly. However, the temporary string created by the
call to `strfunc' is destroyed after `p' is initialized, at which point
`p' is left pointing to freed memory.
Code like this may run successfully under some other compilers,
particularly obsolete cfront-based compilers that delete temporaries
along with normal local variables. However, the GNU C++ behavior is
standard-conforming, so if your program depends on late destruction of
temporaries it is not portable.
The safe way to write such code is to give the temporary a name,
which forces it to remain until the end of the scope of the name. For
example:
string& tmp = strfunc ();
charfunc (tmp.c_str ());