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Why do most string functions in the C/C++ stdlibs take char* pointers?
The signed-ness of char is not even specified in the standard, though most modern compilers (GCC, MSVC) treat char as signed by default.
When would it make sense to treat strings as (possibly) signed bytes? AFAIK there are no meaningful character values below zero in any character set. For certain string operations, the values must be cast to unsigned char anyway.
So why do the stdlibs use char*? Even C++-specific methods, such as string::string(const char *);?
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In C++, the char keyword is used to declare character type variables. A character variable can store only a single character.
char represents a single character whereas String can have zero or more characters. So String is an array of chars. We define char in java program using single quote (') whereas we can define String in Java using double quotes (").
It's safer to use std::string because you don't need to worry about allocating / deallocating memory for the string. The C++ std::string class is likely to use a char* array internally. However, the class will manage the allocation, reallocation, and deallocation of the internal array for you.
The main difference between Character and String is that Character refers to a single letter, number, space, punctuation mark or a symbol that can be represented using a computer while String refers to a set of characters. In C programming, we can use char data type to store both character and string values.
unsigned char.char may be either a signed or an unsigned type. The C and C++ standards explicitly allow either one (it's always a separate type from either unsigned char or signed char, but has the same range as one or the other).char *, std::string is what's used in most C++.
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