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From: Bo Persson <bo@bo-persson.se>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Is a char array initializer a "string literal"?
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2022 11:11:42 +0200
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On 2022-07-26 at 09:57, Juha Nieminen wrote:
> In another forum I was discussing string literals and char arrays.
> During the conversation this question occurred to me:
> In an array initialization like this:
> 
>      char str[] = "hello";
> 
> can that "hello" even be considered a "string literal", or should it
> be classified as something else?
> 
> The question arose because an (actual) string literal has a type of
> array-of-const-char (of a size needed to store the contents of the
> string literal). So for example the type of "hello" is const char[6].
> 
> However, you can't initialize an array with another array. Given that
> fact, that would mean that the "hello" in
> 
>      char str[] = "hello";
> 
> is not a const char[6] (because you can't initialize 'str' with one).
> It's something else. In fact, the above is essentially just syntactic
> sugar for:
> 
>      char str[] = { 'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\0' };
> 
> Thus, should that "hello", in this context, be considered an initializer
> list rather than a "string literal"?
> 
> (Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if the standard still calls it a "string
> literal". But even standards are flawed and ambiguous sometimes. No
> standard is absolutely perfect.)

In the grammar "hello" is a string-literal (with a dash).

http://eel.is/c++draft/lex.string


You also have basic_string literals, with an s at the end - "hello"s.

http://eel.is/c++draft/basic.string.literals


Perhaps they are the real string literals?  ;-)

Or should we say std::string literals?