r-wos.org

Working with strings is painful in C. I knew that.

But I have completely forgotten, how brain-shattering painful it is.

I guess it’s common knowledge, but let’s recap some of the issues:

• strlen() does give you the string’s length – but only in a very strict sense. It does not give you the string’s size. That would be one byte more.
• A simple strlen() call on garbage (that is, a perfect valid string but without the terminating NUL byte, for example) will very likely run until your process segfaults.
• strcpy(), which copies a string to another location, absolutely needs a destination that must be of at least the source’s size and a source that is NUL-terminated. So you’ll have to check for that. Oh, and yes, strcpy() will happily wreck total havoc if you fail to provide it, of course.
• strncpy() is somewhat better, using an additional parameter that limits the bytes copied. That eliminates the “the destination must be of some uncertain size” problem, but introduces new problems in return: If there is no NUL byte among the n bytes that you want to have copied, the destination will not be NUL-terminated. That is, it will be no string. See above for what that means in C. So, you’ll have to include checks, too  – which completely defeats the purpose of choosing strncpy() over the faster strcpy().
• Because of the very nature of “strings” in C, strlen() is of linear time complexity, making string concatenations, for example, much slower than needed.
• etc.

And yes, I know that those pitfalls (and many more) are well-documented in the man pages. I know that C strings are of unmatched space efficiency. I know that it was the only possible way to get unlimited strings on machines with a 64k core.

And it’s not that it was impossible to work with standard strings in C. It’s just much harder than it needs to be. And much more dangerous.

It’s like [insert crazy rhetoric figure, comparing working with C strings with [doing normal stuff] using [highly dangerous equipment]].

Or something like that.

PS: Just in case this isn’t clear to everyone: C is a programming language. In fact, C is a pretty good programming language. I like it very much. It’s a piece of cake to implement better strings in C, custom made for your needs. Only the string implementation of the standard library is, well, a bit unpleasant to use.