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

From: Julia Lawall
Date: Thu Nov 12 2009 - 10:34:02 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.

Does gcc have access to the definition of strlen? It does not seem to be
an inlined function, eg in lib/string.c.

julia
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