Alright! Fixed!

The answer was the null-terminator at the end. It turns out that when I created the char * pointer, the program was assigning garbage from the heap?, or from somewhere, and continued assigning garbage until it ran into its own '\0.' In any case, assigning a null pointer to the end of the char * fixed the problem!

In short: If you're getting a character pointer array that is longer than you expect it...

Hmmm. I had read something about 'null-terminated,' but hadn't made the connection. I'll add that to my code and see what happens.

@oler1s: I actually did use strlen because I didn't want to actually count the number of characters that showed up. I first noticed the problem when I output the character sequence to the command prompt and got a bunch of garbage on the end of what I expected.

As an additional note,...

I've been trying to ignore this issue for a while now, but I've come to the point in my code where I can't do so anymore. (For those of you who are wondering, this is NOT a homework question).

Platform: VC++ 2002
System: Windows XP, sp3

::First, here's the code in question::

...