And yes, you could just use a std::vector< char > as it’s guaranteed that vector elements are stored contiguously. For some reason I feel that relying on this guaranteed “implementation detail” is a bit too intrusive, but I’m not sure why I feel that way as it is a guarantee that can be usefully relied on.

So you could have:

std::vector buffer( bufsize );

and:

DoConversion( &buffer[0], bufsize, test_data, test_len );

Anyway, in the next version of C++ we will get std::unique_ptr to replace auto_ptr which will have a customizable deleter and so will support correctly deleting dynamically allocated arrays.

Pseudocde:
try
{
// allocate memory
}
catch
{
// log error
}
finally
{
// deallocate
}

Note that finally is always called, whether exceptions are thrown or not.

That’s how it works in Java-land and they based it all on C++ right?

Or have I misread it and you only want it deallocated if there is an exception?