topic Re: Char Buffer Initialization in Operating System - HP-UX

Char Buffer Initialization

Alfonso_15 — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 13:52:57 GMT

Good Morning:
I am working gcc 64, for HP11.11. I am migrating a program, and I find several run problems in the handle of variables declared as char pointer:
char *buffer;

Exist in gcc any compile option for initialize the buffer when is declared: I means, when find the instruction
char *buffer;
autmatically put in buffer[0]='\0'
Thanks a lot for any help.

Re: Char Buffer Initialization

A. Clay Stephenson — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 14:04:07 GMT

No and this is absolutely not a good idea. At best, it would be code that is not portable.

You could, of course,
char *buffer = {""};

to do this but this is of limited value because all you have done is created a 1-byte string to hold the NUL. If you stop to think for a moment you will realize that your request really doesn't make a lot of sense because no intelligent space allocation can be done. I suspect that you are testing the string for length 0 and if so then allocating space. A better way is this (which will be completely portable):

char *buffer = NULL;

if (buffer == NULL)
{
buffer = (char *) malloc((size_t) (nbytes + 1));
}

Re: Char Buffer Initialization

Alfonso_15 — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 14:57:46 GMT

Thanks Clay. Now is clear for me.