checking for literals

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C++

Hi all,

Suppose I'm trying to do something like this:

void func(char*& foo)
{
     char* bar = new char[1000]; //allocating more space somewhere else
     //some stuff
     if (foo != null) delete [] foo; //clean up, if there's something here
     foo = bar;
}

That is, the code makes foo point someplace else (maybe the current location is too small). In doing that, it deletes foo's current location, as a part of good memory management. This is fine, if the user passes a char* allocated using new. But if they do something like

char* string = "text";
func(string);

then the delete operation will fail: string literals can't be deleted. How do I work around this? Is there a way to check for string literals? I'd love for my code to be able to support them. I believe the correct behavior in the case of a string literal is to just skip the delete statement, since literals are handled internally (...right?). But that still leaves the question of how to detect whether or not foo points to a literal.

Thoughts?