Re: sizeof vs strlen (was Re: [PATCH 4/4] fs/qnx4: decrement sizeofsize in strncmp)

From: Julia Lawall
Date: Thu Nov 12 2009 - 05:38:03 EST


On Thu, 12 Nov 2009, Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 08:49 +0100, Julia Lawall wrote:
> > From: Julia Lawall <julia@xxxxxxx>
> >
> > As observed by Joe Perches, sizeof of a constant string includes the
> > trailing 0. If what is wanted is to check the initial characters of
> > another string, this trailing 0 should not be taken into account. If an
> > exact match is wanted, strcmp should be used instead.
> [...]
> > strncmp(foo, abc,
> > - sizeof(abc)
> > + sizeof(abc)-1
> > )
> > // </smpl>
> Am I the only one who find "strlen()" instead of "sizeof()-1" here much
> more readable (and to the point).
>
> As for run-time, it shouldn't make a difference for static/constant
> strings as gcc should be able calculate the length at compile time. And
> if the string is not constant, sizeof() is probably wrong anyways.

The rule specifies that the string is a constant.

julia
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