Null-Terminated Strings [LWN.net]

Null-Terminated Strings

Posted Nov 19, 2010 10:58 UTC (Fri) by etienne (subscriber, #25256)
In reply to: Null-Terminated Strings by pr1268
Parent article: Ghosts of Unix past, part 3: Unfixable designs

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.

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