C++ - How to append a char to char*?

Question

I've tried so may ways on the Internet to append a character to a char* but none of them seems to work. Here is one of my incomplete solution:

char* appendCharToCharArray(char * array, char a)
{
    char* ret = "";
    if (array!="") 
    {
        char * ret = new char[strlen(array) + 1 + 1]; // + 1 char + 1 for null;
        strcpy(ret,array);
    }
    else
    {
        ret = new char[2];
        strcpy(ret,array);
    }

    ret[strlen(array)] = a;  // (1)
    ret[strlen(array)+1] = '\0';
    return ret;
}

This only works when the passed array is "" (blank inside). Otherwise it doesn't help (and got an error at (1)). Could you guys please help me with this ? Thanks so much in advanced !

Answer 1

Remove those char * ret declarations inside if blocks which hide outer ret. Therefor you have memory leak and on the other hand un-allocated memory for ret.

To compare a c-style string you should use strcmp(array,"") not array!="". Your final code should looks like below:

char* appendCharToCharArray(char* array, char a)
{
    size_t len = strlen(array);

    char* ret = new char[len+2];

    strcpy(ret, array);    
    ret[len] = a;
    ret[len+1] = '\0';

    return ret;
}

Note that, you must handle the allocated memory of returned ret somewhere by delete[] it.

 

Why you don't use std::string? it has .append method to append a character at the end of a string:

std::string str;

str.append('x');
// or
str += x;