FAQ 28.06 Surely good old-fashioned char is an exception, right?

FAQ 28.06 Surely good old-fashioned char* is an exception, right?

Wrong!

For example, if a container of char* is used when the goal is to have a container of strings, lookup requests may fail since the container will be looking for a particular pointer rather than for the contents of the string. To make matters worse, if a string buffer is used to build the string foo and that is inserted into the container and the string buffer is later changed to junk, the container will appear to contain junk rather than foo.

If a string is desired, a string class should be used and char* should be avoided. Every compiler vendor has a string class, and there is a standard C++ string class called string.