Carl Banks wrote:
Indeed, strncpy does not copy that final NUL if it's at or beyond the nth element. Probably the most mind-bogglingly stupid thing about the standard C library, which has lots of mind-boggling stupidity.
I don't think it was as stupid as that back when C was designed. Every byte of memory was precious in those days, and if you had, say, 10 bytes allocated for a string, you wanted to be able to use all 10 of them for useful data. So the convention was that a NUL byte was used to mark the end of the string *if it didn't fill all the available space*. Functions such as strncpy and snprintf are designed for use with strings that follow this convention. Proper usage requires being cognizant of the maximum length and using appropriate length-limited functions for all operations on such strings. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
