Thread: Most Common problems in C

Originally Posted by Bayint Naung

@ MK27, I forgot that! How to avoid Off by One error?! Count carefully?

I guess. I would say that for allocation, too much is better than too little, but that is not true for iterative reads, so not very good advice. Seems to me that once I read the analogy (you need 11, not 10 fenceposts for a 100' fence with posts every 10 feet) it was easier to conceive of and notice.

Originally Posted by EVOEx

I find your analogy off for your own example.

Technically, I wasn't using that analogy with that example, they were in two separate posts.

You're right, tho, understanding the fencepost error may or may not help with the strlen one in the strict sense of the fencepost analogy being about inclusion in a series (0-10 is eleven numbers).

On the other hand, it is still conceptually similar -- when you get to the tenth pole, you'll notice there's still a unit of fence left unaccounted for, altho in this case it has to do with a C specific issue (what strlen counts and what a C string is) as opposed to a plain old arithmetic error.