Null-Terminated Strings [LWN.net]

Null-Terminated Strings

Posted Nov 18, 2010 15:38 UTC (Thu) by etienne (subscriber, #25256)
In reply to: Null-Terminated Strings by neilbrown
Parent article: Ghosts of Unix past, part 3: Unfixable designs

> I actually think nul terminated strings are simple and elegant and work.

And you can also combine them to do things like:
enum {lang_english, lang_french, lang_german} current_language = lang_french;
const char mltstr_language[] = "english\0francais\0deutch\0"
const char *curlang(const char *mltstr)
{
/* select the right sub-string depending on current_language */
}
void fct(void)
{
printf ("LANG=%s", curlang(mltstr_language))
}
It saves *a lot of space* ; having strings, (aligned) pointers arrays everywhere, and worse having (aligned) size for pascal strings takes easily more memory than the program code and data altogether.

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Null-Terminated Strings

Posted Nov 18, 2010 17:24 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

I like your code example, but it might only work in C (not C++).

Two cases in point:

Using the enum value as an array index might give unpredictable results since C++ treats enumerations as a distinct type (instead of int as in C)¹
The C++ standard library string can have '\0' characters anywhere inside the string (which may also lead to unpredictable behavior at runtime)². Of course, you're referring to a C-style string, so this may be a moot point.

¹ Stroustrup, B. The C++ Programming Language, Special Edition, p. 77
² Ibid, p. 583

Null-Terminated Strings

Posted Nov 19, 2010 10:58 UTC (Fri) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]

The enum is only used like (to have empty substring default to english), so no problem with its C++ size:

const char *curlang(const char *mltstr)
{
const char *ptr = mltstr;
for (unsigned cptlang = 0; cptlang < current_language; cptlang++)
while (*ptr++) {}
return (*ptr)? ptr : mltstr;
}

Oviously none of the substrings can have embedded zero char.

A C++ line of code like:
cout << "The " << big? "big " : "small " << "dog is " << age << " year old.";
needs an efficient storage for small strings, even more when doing a multi language software.

Null-Terminated Strings

Posted Nov 20, 2010 1:03 UTC (Sat) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

> I like your code example, but it might only work in C (not C++).

Sorry, you are confused. It works in both C++ and C.

> Using the enum value as an array index might give unpredictable results
> since C++ treats enumerations as a distinct type (instead of int as in C)1

Nope.

Here the enum is promoted to an integer. C++, like C, promotes a lot of types to integers under the right situations.

> The C++ standard library string can have '\0' characters anywhere inside
> the string (which may also lead to unpredictable behavior at runtime)2. Of
> course, you're referring to a C-style string, so this may be a moot point.

There is no std::string in this example. You are confused.