this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Why are they even named like this?
When I read code, I want to be able to read it.....
Is this from a time when space was expensive and you wanted to reduce the space of the source files on the devs PC???
For me (with a native language != english), this made it a lot harder to get into programming in the first place.
strncpy becomes stringnumbercopy. You can see why short version is used.
And with a bit of namespacing and/or object orientation and usage of dots, it becomes perfectly readable.
There are also camel case and underscores in other languages...
BTW: How on earth should a newcomer know that the letter "n" in that word stands for number without having to google it? The newcomer could even assume that it's a letter of the word string..... And even, if you know that it stands for number, it's still hard for me to understand what it means in this context... I actually had to google it... But that's probably some C++ convention I don't know about, because I don't program in C++.....
C is a little older than namespacing and object orientation. C++ wasn't even a glimmer in Bjarne's eye when these conventions were laid down.
And yes, having to google it is part of the design. Originally C programmers would have had to read actual manuals about this stuff. Once you learn the names you don't really forget so it works well enough even now for ubiquitous standard library functions.
And yet, C was an ergonomic revelation to programmers of the time. Now it's the arcane grandpa that most youngsters don't put up with.
By looking at the difference between
strcpyandstrncpy. Preferably, though, you should simply learn C before writing C.The gist of is is that
strcpytakes a null-terminated string and copies it somewhere, whilestrncpytakes a zero-terminated string and copies it somewhere but will not write more thannbytes.strncpyliterally has exactly one more parameter thanstrcpy, that beingn, hence the name. Ifnis smaller than the string length (as in: distance to first null byte) then you're bound to have garbage in your destination, and to check for that you have to dereference the pointerstrncpyreturns and check if it's actually null. Yay C error handling.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.
Wha? N is just maximum length of string to copy. Data after dst+n is unchanged.
All hail length-prefixed strings!
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 != 8that's not POSIX anyway.Even better, just avoid doing string manipulation in C.
Yeah, let's not talk about 20-bit one's complement ints.
man strncpy