as a reference, the reference to 'ppszOutStr' that a previous poster mentioned wouldn't be typical Apps Hungarian. 'sz' is a null-terminated string, so naming

as a reference, the reference to 'ppszOutStr' that a previous poster mentioned wouldn't be typical Apps Hungarian. 'sz' is a null-terminated string, so naming a variable 'szOutStr' is redundant since 'sz' automatically tells you it's a string. 'szOut' would be fine. The 'pp' at the front tells you it's a pointer to a pointer. You typically only use a 'psz' to refer to a string (I usually used 'sz' since most of the time, you're dealing with allocated memory and that means I had a pointer alread). But if you want to reallocate the string memory , you'd have to take the address of the pointer (&psz) which meant you'd have a pointer to a pointer to a string: 'ppsz = &psz;' When dealing with a 'ppsz', you'd know that you couldn't pass 'ppsz' directly to a function that handled 'psz' variables, you'd need to dereference ppsz (*ppsz) to get a 'psz' to pass to those functions. Useful when dealing with liberal C compilers, not as useful with stricter C++ compilers.