WTL,

I believe strcat() takes char *'s as arguments, which is why it's complaining -- a char isn't a char *. Also, strcat expects the source strings to be null-terminated. The following example illustrates one usage:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

int main( int iArgc, char *pArgv[] )
{
char *cA = "A";
char *cB = "B";

char cDest[10] = {0};

strcat( cDest, cA );
strcat( cDest, cB );

printf( "%s\n", cDest );

return 1;
}

PugsleyButt:~/devstuff/c jmzorko$ gcc strcat.c -o strcat
PugsleyButt:~/devstuff/c jmzorko$ ./strcat
AB

I hope this helps. BTW, the string handling in C++ is much better than that in C, but yeah, sometimes ya just got no choice!

Regards,

John

Falling You - exploring the beauty of voice and sound
www.fallingyou.com

WTL,

... oh, and just to make sure, this is a really common error with beginning C and C++ developers. I remember running into the very same thing when I first learned C, waaaay back in 1986 on an Atari 1040ST (I believe it was the Metacompco C compiler).

Anyway, what Jon says is also true -- sprintf can be your friend here as well.

Regards,

John, who interestingly enough is on a straight-C project currently (adding functionality to the VideoLAN client)

Falling You - exploring the beauty of voice and sound
www.fallingyou.com

also if you force it to compile by using casts or taking the addr of it you will likely crash. You have only a single byte reserved for your "string" so anything concatenated on the end of it would overwrite memory it hadn't reserved.

As a bit of a follow up, thanks for the pointers folks. I managed to beat the code with a stick long enough to get it to do what I wanted.

And then a few days later (of course) , the client changed the requirement that it be done in C and asked for additional functionality, so I re-wrote it in Perl.

But, I went out and picked up a newer C++ manual and see what I was doing wrong. Thanks again!