Displaying Int Variable in LPCSTR CreateWindowEx function

Question

So i am making a basic tic tac toe game as my first program in win32 (just for fun to learn more, no school assignment or anything). I have most of the UI done and the basic gameplay such as clicking squares and placing x's or o's appropriately. I have written it so that it recognizes who is the winner when the game is over and can display a little text window saying "PLAYER 1 WINS!" etc....

No my question is concerning how to display the score. My idea is to have a int variable called scoreplayer1, and when the player wins, i will increase it by 1 (scoreplayer1++). I then want to have the window that has the previous score change to the new score. This is what i have so far (I am going to take out all of the code that is not relevant to this question but if you need more let me know):

My Global Variables:

   //Global Variables

    HINSTANCE hInst;                // current instance
    TCHAR szTitle[MAX_LOADSTRING];      // The title bar text
    TCHAR szWindowClass[MAX_LOADSTRING];        // the main window class name
    HWND hwnd1, hwnd2, hwnd3, hwnd4, hwnd5, hwnd6, hwnd7, hwnd8;
    HWND hwnd9, hwndscore1, hwndscore2, hWnd;

    // Forward declarations of functions included in this code module:
    ATOM    MyRegisterClass(HINSTANCE hInstance);
    BOOL    InitInstance(HINSTANCE, int);
    LRESULT CALLBACK    WndProc(HWND, UINT, WPARAM, LPARAM);
    INT_PTR CALLBACK    About(HWND, UINT, WPARAM, LPARAM);
    int determinewinner();
    int showscore(int win_value);
    int scoreplayer1,scoreplayer2;

The CreateWindow function that originally creates the score windows (they start out blank):

    LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND hWnd, UINT message, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
    {
    switch (message)
    case WM_CREATE:
    hwndscore1 = CreateWindowEx(WS_EX_CLIENTEDGE, TEXT("STATIC"),TEXT(""), WS_CHILD|WS_VISIBLE|SS_CENTER, 20,285,100,20,hWnd,HMENU(NULL),GetModuleHandle(NULL),NULL);
    hwndscore2 = CreateWindowEx(WS_EX_CLIENTEDGE,TEXT("STATIC"),TEXT(""), WS_CHILD|WS_VISIBLE|SS_CENTER, 130,285,100,20,hWnd,HMENU(NULL),GetModuleHandle(NULL),NULL);

Then the function that is trying to handle changing the score window:

    int showscore(int win_value)
    {
if(win_value==1)
{   scoreplayer1++;
    DestroyWindow(hwndscore1);
    hwndscore1 = CreateWindowEx(WS_EX_CLIENTEDGE, TEXT("STATIC"),TEXT(scoreplayer1), WS_CHILD|WS_VISIBLE|SS_CENTER, 20,285,100,20,hWnd,HMENU(NULL),GetModuleHandle(NULL),NULL);
return (scoreplayer1);} // This return part is just temporary because it wants
               // the function to return a value, it doesn't come into play

}

The idea was to destroy the old window and simply recreate a new window with the new score (that seemed to be the easiest way to go about doing it). I know where the problem is, it says i can't put the int scoreplayer1 variable in that TEXT("scoreplayer1") part in the last CreateWindowEx function. The error is: argument of typ int is incompatible with parameter of type LPCSTR.

So how can change the creation of that last window so that it will display a int variable (such as scoreplayer1) that will be increasing as the game goes on? Thanks!

*EDIT***

In response to a comment i attempted to use itoa() to fix the problem, i did the following:

    int showscore(int win_value)
    { if(win_value==1)
{   scoreplayer1++;
char score1[1];
itoa(scoreplayer1, score1, 1);

    DestroyWindow(hwndscore1);
    hwndscore1 = CreateWindowEx(WS_EX_CLIENTEDGE, TEXT("STATIC"),TEXT(score1), WS_CHILD|WS_VISIBLE|SS_CENTER, 20,285,100,20,hWnd,HMENU(NULL),GetModuleHandle(NULL),NULL);
return (scoreplayer1);}

Which forces the program to break as soon as i get to that point in the game... Any ideas on what i did wrong?

Answer 1

Converting an integer to a string can be made MANY different ways in C and C++.

Your edited code fails because the string is 1 character long, and ALL numbers are guaranteed to NOT fit in one character, since all numbers take one character for the string itself, and a further character for the zero byte marking the end of the string. If the number is greater than 9, it will take up three characters, greater than 99 will take 4, and so on.

In C++, I would suggest that, although a bit longer, usign a stringstream to output the number to is an easier/safer method that avoids the problems if figuring out how much space you need for the string (and allows output of more complex things than just one integer, since you can simply combine any output, just like you would for console output using cout).

Something like this:

 std::stringstream ss;
 ss << scoreplayer1;

 hwndscore1 = CreateWindowEx(WS_EX_CLIENTEDGE, TEXT("STATIC"),ss.str().c_str(), WS_CHILD|WS_VISIBLE|SS_CENTER, 20,285,100,20,hWnd,HMENU(NULL),GetModuleHandle(NULL),NULL);