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From: ml27192@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (lanett mark)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Str255 in C
Message-ID: <1991Jan15.181224.4809@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 15 Jan 91 18:12:24 GMT
References: <47171@cci632.UUCP> <3756@uakari.primate.wisc.edu>
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Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
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bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) writes:

>From article <47171@cci632.UUCP>, by ph@cci632.UUCP (Pete Hoch):
>> Giving benefit of the doubt, this reply suffers from less than precise
>> wording.  In reality the "\p" is only a place holder for the pascal
>> style character count.  I believe the compiler supplies this number
>> so it is evaluated very early on.  However this is still a c string!
>> That means it is still NULL terminated.

>Nope.  Depends on the compiler, so check your manual first.

Well for the case 'Str255 a = "\pThis will work"' the \p is replaced with
the length count _and_ the string is still a null-terminated C string.
So you can do a strcpy and it will work for both Think and MPW.

However, if you just get a pascal string from the toolbox it will _not_ have
the terminator and that _won't_ work (you must use strncpy with n=b[0] (+1?)
). C-created pascal strings are terminated; pascal-created pascal strings are
not (or course).

>And if you want your code to be portable, don't write code that
>*depends* on the compiler's behavior.

Yes.


Mark Lanett