[lug] An unusual C construct

[Anthony Foiani]

Bear Giles <bgiles at coyotesong.com> writes:

> The point is to use snprintf(), not sprintf(), where the second
> argument is the size of the buffer you're writing into.  That
> prevents buffer overflows.  You should still explicitly set the last
> char to \0 since the function doesn't.

Sure.  I didn't mean to nit-pick; it just took me a bit to read
through your examples to figure out what you were doing.

Anymore, I do most of this type of work in C++; using std::string
means that I can pretty much ignore all these issues ('\0', storage
space, etc).  Used sensibly, std::string is almost as fast, too --
maybe even faster.

(Consider a typical "copy some string" situation; with plain
zero-terminated C strings, it takes two passes to do it correctly.
Since std::string keeps a length field alongside the data, it can
correctly size the destination without traversing the data.)

Anyway.

Happy hacking,
t.