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

[James Dennett]

On Thursday, October 28, 2004, at 03:52 PM, Balog Pal wrote:

>> 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.
>
> No length safety is a prblem everyone shall be aware. Unfortunaltely 
> sprintf
> has no way to pass in the buffer length, and stop there.  Many
> implementations provide such safe versions (snprintf ot alike) , those 
> are
> not standard, but I'd suggest use those instead of sprintf.
>
snprintf is a standard part of C99, though not in C++03.  It's very 
widely
implemented even where C99 isn't supported, but varies in whether it
guarantees nul-termination, and in what the return value is.

-- James