Hi - I've got a method which should take a variety of types and with the exception of taking a function pointer it shouldn't care about which types it's getting, so I thought that a boost::any would be a nice way to achieve this. Here's a simplified prototype: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ class Table { public: // Base case void doSomething(const boost::any& input); // Special overload for function pointers for some special reason. // // Has logic to interpret NULL pointer as integer 0 and pass to // "base" boost::any case. void doSomething(void (*f)(void)); }; ------------------------------------------------------------------------ When I tried to call doSomething with a string literal argument (i.e. table.doSomething("Hello")), it of course failed since boost:any can't be initialized with an array. Okay - no problem. Another overload should do the trick, right? So I added an overload like this: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ class Table { public: void doSomething(const boost::any& input); // Supposed to take a const char*, convert it to a string, and // pass off to boost::any case. void doSomething(const std::string& input); void doSomething(void (*f)(void)); }; ------------------------------------------------------------------------ on the theory that a const char* would convert to a std::string. I couldn't add an overload for const char* directly since that would conflict with the overload for the function pointer (i.e. table.doSomething(0) would be ambiguous between the function pointer and the const char*). Unfortunately, this didn't work. When I called this with "Hello.": ------------------------------------------------------------------------ $ g++ -W -Wall -Werror -ansi any_overload_problem.cpp any_overload_problem.cpp: In function 'int main()': any_overload_problem.cpp:32: error: call of overloaded 'doSomething(const char [7])' is ambiguous any_overload_problem.cpp:8: note: candidates are: void Table::doSomething(const boost::any&) any_overload_problem.cpp:19: note: void Table::doSomething(const std::string&) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I admit that I didn't foresee this, although I suppose I should have. Even though a boost:any can't be initialized with a const char*, that signature is still participating in the overload resolution. So does anyone have any suggestions for how to deal with this sort of thing? Is there a good way to get the boost::any conversions to match "less well" than something like the std::string conversion? Or am I just way off-base in trying to use boost::any here at all? Thanks! Dan Katz