It is dangerous to use pointers or references to portions of a
temporary object. The compiler may very well delete the object before
you expect it to, leaving a pointer to garbage. The most common place
where this problem crops up is in classes like string classes,
especially ones that define a conversion function to type char *
or const char *—which is one reason why the standard
string class requires you to call the c_str member
function. However, any class that returns a pointer to some internal
structure is potentially subject to this problem.
For example, a program may use a function strfunc that returns
string objects, and another function charfunc that
operates on pointers to char:
string strfunc ();
void charfunc (const char *);
void
f ()
{
const char *p = strfunc().c_str();
...
charfunc (p);
...
charfunc (p);
}
In this situation, it may seem reasonable to save a pointer to the C
string returned by the c_str member function and use that rather
than call c_str repeatedly. However, the temporary string
created by the call to strfunc is destroyed after p is
initialized, at which point p is left pointing to freed memory.
Code like this may run successfully under some other compilers, particularly obsolete cfront-based compilers that delete temporaries along with normal local variables. However, the GNU C++ behavior is standard-conforming, so if your program depends on late destruction of temporaries it is not portable.
The safe way to write such code is to give the temporary a name, which forces it to remain until the end of the scope of the name. For example:
const string& tmp = strfunc (); charfunc (tmp.c_str ());