Concat Strings

[jovton]

How do I go about concatenating two strings?
I know I should use lstrcat for it, but how?
I get a lot of Access Violation errors,
and the lstrcat just don't want to work.

For example...

I want to concatenate the strings "First " and "Second ", to form "First Second ".
Then I want to concatenate the result with "Third", to form "First Second Third".

I know it must not be that hard, but for me it is.
Help, anyone?
Thanx.

[parksie]

Try just using strcat. Or alternatively, my preferred method is to do it myself, or use the string class:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using std::cout;
using std::string;

void main() {
    string x;

    x = "First ";
    x += "Second ";
    x += "Third";

    cout << x << endl;
}

[jovton]

Thanx parksie.
You seem to know an awf lot.
But another problem arises.
I want to put the final result into a LPCTSTR string.
For example:

   string x;
   LPCTSTR MyStr;
   // Do x string stuff
   MyStr = x; // ????????? How now?

[parksie]

You shouldn't use LPCTSTR unless you want to have multiple-character set compatibility. You can access a const pointer to the string by using x.c_str() (a member function):

const char *pStr = x.c_str();

Or alternatively you can just copy it:

char *pStr = new char[x.length()+1];
strcpy(pStr, x.c_str);
pStr[x.length()] = 0;

Then use pStr as you would normally. For things like MessageBox you can simply pass the result of the function:

MessageBox(hWnd, text.c_str(), caption.c_str(), MB_OK);