Re: Total Newbie Backward Compat Question

Hal Vaughan said:

> Richard Heathfield wrote:
> 
<snip>
>> 
>> Man wanna use gets, I tell him bad dog no biscuit. Some things are so
>> broken that they are wrong by definition.
>> 
>> But man wanna use strncpy or strtok or using namespace std, I tell him
>> good luck, here's how it works, here are the gotchas to watch out for,
>> be careful out there.
> 
> What are the issues with strncpy or strtok and what would people tend to
> use instead?
 
That isn't really the point of my article, which is that, despite a
perhaps 
less-than-perfect design, such things *can* be used safely, and there's no

particular reason why they shouldn't be, and it's not our job to dictate 
to people what they can and can't use.

But to answer your question: strncpy is (wrongly) seen as a "safe strcpy" 
(it isn't), it always writes n bytes (which lots of people don't realise),

and - as Anand pointed out - it's quite easy to find yourself with a 
non-terminated 'string' (which is Very Bad Indeed unless you realise and 
intend it and know how to deal with it). The strtok function can't process

more than one string at a time - that is, you can't start processing one 
string, process another, and then return to the first, because it 
maintains state internally. And of course Anand is right that it isn't 
thread-safe (for the same underlying reason).

-- 
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www.
+rjh@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999