atoi and iota seem like perfect partners.
atoi is the ‘ascii to integer’ function and itoa is the reverse, the ‘integer to ascii’ function.
You would use atoi to convert a string, say, “23557” to the actual integer 23557.
Similarly, you would use itoa to convert an integer, say 44711, to the equivalent string “44711”.
Very handy.
Now, if you’ve written a lot of code using Microsoft Visual C++ (which is where I first started when I was learning C and C++), you may not be aware of the fact that atoi is part of the ANSI standard, whereas itoa is not. The MSVC compiler supports itoa, so if you are coding on this platform – particularly if you are learning on this platform – then it appears that atoi and itoa are a complementary pair that would be available everywhere. Not so!