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submitted 2 months ago by Maven@lemmy.zip to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[-] uis@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

If n is smaller than the string length (as in: distance to first null byte) then you're bound to have garbage in your return destination

Wha? N is just maximum length of string to copy. Data after dst+n is unchanged.

In retrospect null-terminated strings were a mistake, but so were many other things, at some point you just have to accept that there's hysterical raisins everywhere.

All hail length-prefixed strings!

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Data after dst+n is unchanged.

Sure but that means the part before that is garbage because you have a null terminated string without terminator.

Or at least that's how I see it. If your intention isn't to start and end with a null-terminated string you should be using memcpy. Let us not talk about situations where CHAR_BIT != 8 that's not POSIX anyway.

Even better, just avoid doing string manipulation in C.