How to iterate through char array with multiple null terminators?

[dligentSlacker]

Hi, I would really appreciate if anyone could help me on the following problem...


A char array has multiple strings, each of which ends with a null terminator '\0'...

For example

char A={string1'\0'string2'\0'string3.....}

So if I do print char array, or some other string manipulations, it's always gonna stop at the very first occurrence of '\0', and ignores the rest of the chars, is there a way to get around with it?

[cas]

Write your own string functions.

You'll have to have some way of figuring out where the end is; say, a count of substrings, or the length of the array in bytes, etc.

If you want to treat this as multiple strings, you can get yourself a pointer to the beginning of each substring (again, somehow knowing where the last string is), and use C's string manipulation functions. But if you want to treat the whole array as a string-like object, you have to do something else. At the very least memcpy() might be handy for copying your string-like thing.

[hk_mp5kpdw]

There are certain functions I am aware of (the windows GetOpenFileName function is one such example) that pass arguments consisting of such character arrays. They differentiate the end of the data by a double null terminator. You'd basically need code that checks for a double null at the end of your data if you adopted that route.

[CommonTater]

Hi, I would really appreciate if anyone could help me on the following problem...


A char array has multiple strings, each of which ends with a null terminator '\0'...

For example

char A={string1'\0'string2'\0'string3.....}

So if I do print char array, or some other string manipulations, it's always gonna stop at the very first occurrence of '\0', and ignores the rest of the chars, is there a way to get around with it?

You need to set pointers to the beginning of each string in the chain...

char multistring[1024] = "This\0is\0my\0multi-string\0\0";
char *idx = multistring;

while (*idx)
  { printf("%s", idx);
     idx += strlen(idx) + 1; }

[TheBigH]

The trouble with using a double \0 to denote the end of the multistring is that you cannot then have legitimate empty strings.

If you know you might have empty strings and that there are characters in your character set that will never appear in a legitimate string you might use one of those as your end-of-multistring delimiter.

[quzah]

Then you need to start passing your buffer's size around every time you use it. You can't expect to use normal string functions on not-normal-strings.


Quzah.

[CommonTater]

The trouble with using a double \0 to denote the end of the multistring is that you cannot then have legitimate empty strings.

If you know you might have empty strings and that there are characters in your character set that will never appear in a legitimate string you might use one of those as your end-of-multistring delimiter.

Unfortunately Windows convention disagrees with you... Many Windows functions return multi-strings. They send C strings, null separated with a double null at the end. And, no they cannot contain empty strings.

The GetOpenFilename() function is one such example.