Re: Dealing with very large blocks of character data

On 2011/11/30 12:26 PM, David Gibbs wrote:

... The function I'm enhancing is already embedded pretty deep in the
RPG code ... ripping it out and re-engineering it would be very
difficult and probably cause a significant performance problem.

Since it's an existing function, I'm wondering if null-terminating the data will cause a problem? If not a logic problem, possibly a performance problem, since much of your data will probably have to be copied to temps to add the null-terminators.

It can be tricky to use the C str functions with data that isn't normally null-terminated. Tricky in general, and also tricky to ensure correctness. It's easy to miss coding errors because uninitialized storage is often x'00', so a function can appear to be working correctly when it's only working accidentally.

I have scars ... strcpy and strcat are especially creepy since they assume the target is big enough to hold the source value plus the null terminator.

It might be worthwhile to write your own versions of scan, subst etc using the MEM functions that Mark Waterbury mentioned, instead of embarking on a null-terminated voyage.