The standard string library is still pretty bad. This would have been a much better addition for safe strcpy. Safe strcpy char *stecpy(char *d, const char *s, const char *e) { while (d Existing solutions are still error-prone, requiring continual recalculation of buffer len after each use in a long sequence, when the only thing that matters is where the buffer ends, which is effectively a constant across multiple cal…
What's wrong with: *p += sprintf(*p, "hello"); *p += sprintf(*p, "world");
Well, that should be `snprintf()` to start with, but even with that, there are issues. The return type of `snprintf()` is `int`, so it can return a negative value if there was some error, so you have to check for that case. That out of the way, a positive return value is (and I'm quoting from the man page on my system) "[i]f the output was truncated due to this limit then the return value is the number of characters which would have been written to the final string if enough space had been available." So to safely use `snprintf()` the code would look something like:
int size = snprintf(NULL,0,"some format string blah blah ...");
if (size size)
{
// ... um ... we still got truncated?
}
One thing I've noticed about the C standard library is that is seems adverse to functions allocating memory (outside of `malloc()`, `calloc()` and `realloc()`). I wonder if this has something to do with embedded systems?