Getting a char* from a _variant_t in optimal time

Question

Here's the code I want to speed up. It's getting a value from an ADO recordset and converting it to a char*. But this is slow. Can I skip the creation of the _bstr_t?

                _variant_t var = pRs->Fields->GetItem(i)->GetValue();

                if (V_VT(&var) == VT_BSTR)
                {
                    char* p = (const char*) (_bstr_t) var;

Answer 1

The first 4 bytes of the BSTR contain the length. You can loop through and get every other character if unicode or every character if multibyte. Some sort of memcpy or other method would work too. IIRC, this can be faster than W2A or casting (LPCSTR)(_bstr_t)