Item 16: Know how to pass vector and string data to legacy APIs

Since C++ was standardized in 1998, the C++ elite haven’t been terribly subtle in their attempt to nudge programmers away from arrays and towards vectors. They’ve been similarly overt in trying to get developers to shift from char* pointers to string objects. There are good reasons for making these changes, including the elimination of common programming errors (see Item 13) and the ability to take full advantage of the power of the STL algorithms (see, e.g., Item 31).

Still, obstacles remain, and one of the most common is the existence of legacy C APIs that traffic in arrays and char* pointers instead of vector and string objects. Such APIs will exist for a long time, so we must make peace with them if we are to use the STL effectively.