On 29 May 2010 06:20, Mike Caron <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 28/05/2010 2:17 PM, Ralph Versteegen wrote:
>>
>> On 29 May 2010 06:02, James Paige<[email protected]>  wrote:
>>>
>>> How do zstrings work?
>>>
>>> Back in the days of the one C/C++ class I took, I remember learning that
>>> zstrings were a zero-terminated string buffer.
>>>
>>> They were no good for storing arbitrary binary data, because the first 0
>>> would terminate the string, causing any data from the 0 to the end of
>>> the buffer to be ignored.
>>>
>>> Am I correct to assume that the zstring ptr's used in Reload are not
>>> like that?
>>>
>>> I would hate to be losing saved tag data beccause 8 or more
>>> low-numbered tags in a row happened to all be off.
>>>
>>> Please put my probably-unfounded fears to rest :)
>>>
>>> ---
>>> James
>>
>> Right. They are actually just byte ptrs. I don't understand why Mike
>> used zstring instead of byte ptr, since there's a separate GetString
>> if you want a string instead of a binary lump.
>>
>> Mike wrote in r3540:
>>
>>  - Also, nodes now keep track of the size of their internal ZStrings,
>> in case they have embedded nulls.
>
> I used ZString ptr so that I would only need one pointer to do all of the
> following:
>
> - Cast to String if requested
> - Store arbitrary binary daya
> - Cache strings if needed (although, this doesn't happen currently with
> data)

(No idea what you mean)

> - etc.
>
> --
> Mike

I don't see the point of having a "GetZString" function. Surely if you
wanted a string, you would use GetString instead, whereas if you
wanted binary data, you would expect a "GetBinary" function which
returns a byte ptr instead. Plus a SetContent overload.

So, all binary blobs should be terminated in-memory by an extra null?

Suppose that you want to store x bytes of binary, so you call
ResizeZString(node, x). Then you retrieve the Zstring and write to it.
Shouldn't you also write an extra null? That's a bit of a nuisance.
Just look at SaveBitsetArray: not only does it not write the null, but
it writes off the end of allocated memory (which may be causing
crashes for James this very moment :P).
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