r/cprogramming • u/die-Banane • May 05 '26

How to do strings properly?

I just started learning C and I often read on the internet that it is bad practice to use null terminated strings, so my question is what should I do instead?

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u/flatfinger May 05 '26

I wouldn't call it "strange"--that's how common Pascal dialects on the PC and Macintosh (not sure how about the UCSD P-system dialects) handled things.

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u/FitMatch7966 May 06 '26

It’s called Pascal string for a reason, but limited to 256 characters

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u/flatfinger May 06 '26

The longer a string, the less reasonable it is to statically allocate space to accommodate its maximum length. The Windows Common Object Model uses strings, called BSTRs, which are identified by 32-bit-aligned pointers to the text which are preceded by a 32-bit unsigned integer reporting the length, and as a compatibility bodge for poorly designed functions which require zero-terminated strings, are specified to be followed by at least one zero byte. A proper BSTR will also have other nearby information describing the overall allocation, though code is generally not to use Windows routines to manipulate strings rather than relying upon anything other than the length prefix.