Programming Tutorials

Concatenated String Literals in C++

By: Stanley B. Printer Friendly Format    

Two string literals (or two wide string literals) that appear adjacent to one another and separated only by spaces, tabs, or newlines are concatenated into a single new string literal. This usage makes it easy to write long literals across separate lines:

     // concatenated long string literal
     std::cout << "a multi-line "
                  "string literal "
                  "using concatenation"
               << std::endl;

When executed this statement would print:

     a multi-line string literal using concatenation

What happens if you attempt to concatenate a string literal and a wide string literal? For example:

     // Concatenating plain and wide character strings is undefined
     std::cout << "multi-line " L"literal " << std::endl;

The result is undefined that is, there is no standard behavior defined for concatenating the two different types. The program might appear to work, but it also might crash or produce garbage values. Moreover, the program might behave differently under one compiler than under another.