Could std::string::c_str() ever return nullptr?

Question

I have read several topics here and on other resources and did not found exact answer. The answer seems to be never. Please confirm.

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Stop. Not never. As noted in Why can you assign nullptr to std::string?:

std::string str {nullptr};  // Undefined behavior

So if this will not throw (depends on implementation), c_str() could return (char_t*)nullptr.

I believe there are no other ways to get nullptr from c_str(). But must ask StackOverflow community to be sure. Thanks for attention.

Answer 1

No. Since c_str returns a pointer p to a null-terminated array of characters, there must be some value i >= 0 such that p[i] == '\0', and thus p cannot be null.