All your friends know about C++11's new stoi and to_string, right? If not, here's a quick refresher to share:

atoi and itoa conversions in C++11

by FangLu

The key reminder from the article:

... The atoi and itoa conversions in C are not very satisfying to programmers, because programmers need to deal with invalid input and exceptions to avoid worst case. On the other hand, these functions are straightforward and easy to use. So they are not rare in C++ code...

In C++11, global functions, such as std::to_string, std::stoi/stol/stoll are introduced to implement atoi/itoa conversions conveniently. For example:

string s;

s += to_string(12) + " is int, ";

s += to_string(3.14f) + " is float.";

cout << s << endl;

where to_string can do type conversion according to the parameter type.

Here is another example:

string s("12");

int i = stoi(s);

cout << i << endl;