[Effective-cpp] Item 2: The String Formatters of Manor Farm, Part 1: sprintf

[Paul Grenyer]

Hi Walter

Another very good summary. I didn't have a lot to say about this item (but I
have something to say about the next), other than I wish I had read it 4
years when I was just starting my C++ career. :-)

Regards
Paul

Paul Grenyer
email: paul at paulgrenyer.co.uk
web: http://www.paulgrenyer.co.uk
articles: http://www.paulgrenyer.dyndns.org/articles/

Jensen should have gone to Williams.
Ecclestone is killing the sport.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Walter Vannini" <walterv at gbbservices.com>
To: "effective-cpp" <effective-cpp at accu.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 4:18 AM
Subject: [Effective-cpp] Item 2: The String Formatters of Manor Farm,Part 1:
sprintf


> Item 2: The String Formatters of Manor Farm, Part 1: sprintf
>
> The advantages and disadvantages of sprintf are discussed. The
> alternatives to using sprintf will be discussed in Item 3, the following
> item. Those alternatives are: snprintf, std::stringstream,
> std::strstream, and boost::lexical_cast.
>
> The advantages of sprintf are:
>
> It's part of the C++ standard.
>
> It's easy to use, and the resulting code is clear.
>
> It's highly efficient, since it writes directly to a character array.
>
> The disadvantages are:
>
> There is no length safety. There is no way to explicitly limit how much
> of the character array is used. This can and often does result in buffer
> overrun errors.
>
> There is no type safety. Errors in the format specification are not
> caught at compile time. They're caught at run time, if you're lucky.
> Lint tools will catch many of these problems.
>
> It is difficult to use in a template. An ugly example using
> specializations is provided.
>
> For those wondering about "Manor Farm": in the novel "Animal Farm", the
> original name of the farm that became "Animal farm" was "Manor Farm".
>
>
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