Tom, Thanks for your recent explanation in the issue discussion (Issue #188). This is good general "string" talk and applicable to a wide range of code. For that reason I'm moving the discussion here so it's more easily found later, instead of hidden in Github issue comments.
Pardon me while I summarize my limited knowledge of "strings" at this point: There aren't actually strings in C, only null-terminated character buffers. We can't run past the end or else we read/write from other stuff in memory. In Xastir we often use character buffers of size MAX_DEVICE_BUFFER, which is the case for the Opentrac code. At one point we got rid of almost all of the strnXX() type of calls, switching to xastir_snprintf() instead... Perhaps the Opentrac routines were coded up later or weren't converted at the time. >From Tom: ----- "There was a lot if incorrect use of strncat in Xastir, mostly using incorrect values of "n" --- it's supposed to be the maximum number of characters that can fit into the destination string, and in many cases the code had been written to specify that number as the number of characters to copy out of the source string instead. We fixed a lot of that, but the opentrac code had a lot of it. The "right" fix is to fix the strncat calls so that one keeps track of how much room is left in the destination string, and use that as the"n" in strncat." ----- I can certainly do that last but it seems like a lot of busy work in C. Other languages have string functions which handle all of this. Are there any C libraries that make it easier these days? I know I couldn't find a good one before and that's why xastir_snprintf() came about. -- Curt, WE7U http://xastir.org http://www.sarguydigital.com _______________________________________________ Xastir-dev mailing list Xastir-dev@lists.xastir.org http://xastir.org/mailman/listinfo/xastir-dev
