On 20 October 2005, Ankit Gupta wrote:
> Hi
> I read this mail by i dont know who (may be shraddam sir) which said that he
> did
> not understand the need for the "strcpy" to return the pointer to the first
> element.
> But there is a problem of "counting the no of words" where it is neccessary
> for
> the pointer to return to the base else it seems impossible to make such a
> program
Well consider the following snippet of code:
char * p, * q;
char buff[100];
/* Give q some value, then do: */
p = strcpy(buff, q);
Now in this code, the pointer p will _always_ point to the buffer. And we
already know where buffer points to, as otherwise the code will not run. The
value returned by strcpy is always its first argument, so the above code could
equally well be:
char * p, * q;
char buff[100];
p = buff;
/* Give q some value, then do: */
strcpy(buff, q);
The two pieces of code have exactly the same effect. The only way you might not
know the pointer to the first element copied would be in code like:
char * p = strcpy("apples", "bananas");
This may, or may not, change the string "bananas" to "apples", depending on
whether it is in RAM or ROM, but in any case the pointer p will point to the
string. But again, you could have written the code as:
char * p = "apples";
strcpy(p, "bananas");
So, as I see it, the only useful value that strcpy could have been defined to
return would be a pointer to the end of the string copied, or else a count of
the number of characters copied. Or it should have been defined as void, and
not return a value at all.
Anand Shraddhan
(There is a deliberate bug in the above code...)
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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