Hello,

I'm new to the boards, and I've been struggling with a problem porting my
company's code from Visual C++ 6.0 to Visual C++ 2005.

We've found some crashes that I've traced to the 'c_str()' member of the
standard string class.   I've debugged into the deepest layers of the system
code and cannot explain this.

What we have is a class with a private 'string' member:

 string _linkType;

And public function that returns it:

 class Link
 ....
 string getLinkType() const {return _linkType; }

When attempting to access the string as a char * later in the code, the
resulting string "1M" does not get extracted properly:

Link *ilink;
const char *pLinkType;
pLinkType = ilink->getLinkType().c_str();

The result of this is that pLinkType is "".

Now - here's the weird part.

const char *blah;        
string strvalue;
strvalue = ilink->getLinkType();
blah = strvalue.c_str();

If I do this, 'blah' contains the proper string '1M'.

How can this be?  If I break apart the operation into two lines, it works.  
Keep it as one line and it fails!?

I've tried defining the member as std::string and return value from the get
function as std::string as well, with no change in behavior.    I'd really
like a good solution to this, as this example literally shows up hundreds of
times in our code.  It would be a lot of work to make the massive changes to
ensure the proper value is getting returned.

This works just fine in Visual C++ 6.0.  I've even installed VC++2005 SP1 to
see if it was fixed there, with no change.

Thanks so much in advance for your help!