@OP in general you should never return pointers to local variables
He's not assigning buffer[1] a pointer to a local variable, but rather the value of a local variable, and that value happens to be a pointer to a const string. That one is "stable", IIRC, because string constants are placed into memory at program startup (I could be wrong on this, I didn't check...)
I'm not saying that code makes any sense or that it isnt' the spagettiest I've ever seen 