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authorBlue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com>2010-09-10 18:53:05 +0000
committerBlue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com>2010-09-10 18:53:05 +0000
commitd241f143c95861f46f7b75de96a8a3276517a14f (patch)
treee29aea6de50b4ac7f3cdc34433312e6f93819b89 /HACKING
parent54b2cc50307097e903579a3fb61855c889c78ee9 (diff)
HACKING: add string management rules
Add string management rules, somewhat like libvirt HACKING. Signed-off-by: Blue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'HACKING')
-rw-r--r--HACKING24
1 files changed, 24 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/HACKING b/HACKING
index da0c1e84e6..3ad87aa362 100644
--- a/HACKING
+++ b/HACKING
@@ -86,3 +86,27 @@ that qemu_malloc() call with zero size is not allowed.
Memory allocated by qemu_vmalloc or qemu_memalign must be freed with
qemu_vfree, since breaking this will cause problems on Win32 and user
emulators.
+
+4. String manipulation
+
+Do not use the strncpy function. According to the man page, it does
+*not* guarantee a NULL-terminated buffer, which makes it extremely dangerous
+to use. Instead, use functionally equivalent function:
+void pstrcpy(char *buf, int buf_size, const char *str)
+
+Don't use strcat because it can't check for buffer overflows, but:
+char *pstrcat(char *buf, int buf_size, const char *s)
+
+The same limitation exists with sprintf and vsprintf, so use snprintf and
+vsnprintf.
+
+QEMU provides other useful string functions:
+int strstart(const char *str, const char *val, const char **ptr)
+int stristart(const char *str, const char *val, const char **ptr)
+int qemu_strnlen(const char *s, int max_len)
+
+There are also replacement character processing macros for isxyz and toxyz,
+so instead of e.g. isalnum you should use qemu_isalnum.
+
+Because of the memory management rules, you must use qemu_strdup/qemu_strndup
+instead of plain strdup/strndup.