[missblit]

It's possible I'm just used to it, but I've never found std::string more complicated than, say, python (what's up with unicode in 2 vs 3?) or JavaScript (UTF-16 = surrogate pair pain).

It's essentially a std::vector<char> with a few random convenience features bolted on.

I guess some of the confusing points are: not unicode aware, string literals aren't std::strings by default, c_str returns a pointer to a buffer with length one greater than the string length, and the usual C++ quirks like why is there both data and c_str?

[saagarjha]

> the usual C++ quirks like why is there both data and c_str

The usual C++ response: for backwards compatibility, because data was not required to null-terminate prior to C++11.