why won't atof work here?

[perien]

I'm fairly new (my second day) to c++ so if this is a dumb question, I apologize in advance:


I have a vector enVec defined as follows

vector<string> enVec;

cout << enVec[1];

gives the following

-4.07359333e+00

so why doesn't something like this work?

atof(enVec[1])

I get the error:

error: no instance of function "atof" matches the argument list
argument types are: (std::string)
atof(enVec[1]);
^