(Note followups, this has stopped being very Pythony.) On 2010-11-11, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> wrote: > Another function that should be deprecated is strncat???I myself was caught > out misunderstanding it recently. What purpose does it serve?
I'm wondering if you're thinking of strncpy(), which is the famously bogus one. strncat() just has a fencepost error -- given a limit N, it will write at most N+1 characters. strncpy(), however, pads with null bytes if the source string isn't long enough, and does not null terminate if there isn't room to. This behavior is nearly always undesireable. However, if you were building a filesystem in which file path names were given exactly sixteen bytes of space in the directory entry, and you didn't want to truncate them to 15 bytes, you might write precisely this behavior. So that's what we got. I don't know whether anyone's gotten buy-in from the standards people for strlcpy()/strlcat(), but I really hope so. Me, I just use snprintf with a %s format instead of str*cpy(). -s -- Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.net http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated! I am not speaking for my employer, although they do rent some of my opinions. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
