How much "data" you can put into a string?

As programmers, we work with strings a lot. Most of the time, I use them开发者_开发技巧 without thinking about them too much. Lately though, I have been using strings to return copious amounts of information from a function with no problem. My latest example is a binary tree with 10's of 1000's of entries. I have a recursive function that simply keeps adding to the string with a newline character at the end. This function gave no trouble.

So is there any kind of "limit" on how many characters you can put in a string or are you only limited by the amount of memory available?

The real limit on the size a string object can reach is returned by member max_size.

from here.

Link specific to max_size

So yeah, it's implementation-specific.

No, the only limit is available contiguous memory. There are no artificial limits imposed on string length; the length of a string is kept in a size_t variable, the maximum value of which is the largest addressable byte in the system (be it 8 or 16 or 32 or 64 bit or whatever).

It's very big but not unlimited though. You can use string::max_size to return the maximum number of characters that the string object can hold. Note that the returned value may vary from system to system.