>>>>> Steinar Bang <s...@dod.no>: >>>>> Philipp Marek <philipp.ma...@linbit.com>: >> It might be easier for callers if this did >> if (isNull) >> return ""; >> so that the value could just be used in printf() and similar without >> explicit checking.
> If that was ok to do, one might as well represent a NULL with an empty > string. As I said in a different message in the thread, if you need NULL, I think returning auto_ptr<string> is the simplest way that is both standards compliant, won't leak memory, and doesn't force you to handle object life cycle for the returned strings.
