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

[White Wolf]

effective-cpp-bounces at accu.org wrote:
> 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. 

And it still only solves one part of the problem.  It does not solve the
problem of ellipsis not "scaling" to user defined types.  Which - in
practice - means that if any format string function is used in a C++
codebase, it will - sooner or later - break encapsulation.

Attila