> I’ve long been employing the length+data string struct. If there was one thing I could go back and time to change about the C language, it would be removal of the null-terminated string. It's not necessary to go back in time. I proposed a way to do it in modern C - no existing code would break: https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html It's simple, and easy to implement.
Even simpler, you can do something like this to have length-delimited AND null-terminated strings (written from memory, no guarantees of correctness etc.):
char *lenstrdup(char *s) {
int n = strlen(s);
char *p = malloc(n + sizeof(int) + 1);
if(p) {
strcpy(p + sizeof(int), s);
*(int*)p = n;
p += sizeof(int);
}
return p;
}
void lenstrfree(char *s) {
free(s-sizeof(int));
}