usage of array::data and array::front

Question

Is there any difference between & array::front and array::data?

ex 1 :

const char* cstring = "Test String";
array<char, 12> carray;
std::memcpy(&carray.front(), cstring, 12);

ex 2:

const char* cstring = "Test String";
array<char, 12> carray;
std::memcpy(carray.data(), cstring, 12);

are the above two same? Or is there any special usage of array::data?

Answer 1

The difference is simply that front() returns a reference to the first element and data() returns a pointer to it. For zero-sized arrays, the former is undefined and the latter is unspecified. For non-zero-sized arrays, data() is exactly equivalent to &front().

In this case, you should prefer data() simply because you need a pointer and that gives you a pointer.