Passing a string to an external function

[Ryan Shepperd]

Dear Community

I'm not a C++ programmer but I managed to write most of a wrapper function
for an external C program, which I need to call from Octave.  The C
function expects arguments of type "float" and "char."  I've successfully
passed the C-function its float arguments by first using a type cast in
the following manner:
  ColumnVector x = args(0).vector_value ();
  some_float_var = (float) x(0);
This works great.  Unfortunately, I have not been able to figure out,
after a couple days, how to convert an Octave "string" to a "char."  I
can access the string from inside the wrapper function by
  string filename = args(1).string_value ();
but I can't find a way to convert the string to a char array (char[30]) in
order to pass the argument to the C function.  If this is really quite
trivial, I apologize for wasting bandwidth; however, I have done my best
grep through the help archive and example wrapper functions. :) 

If someone more knowledgeable could tell me how to type cast from
"string" to a "char," I would be grateful.

THANKS
Ryan Shepperd
address@hidden





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