Re: snprintf heads-up

Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> wrote: > > This behaviour is not particularly useful, because it means that if your > > buffer turns out to be too small, and you want to extend it, you have no > > way of knowing by how much you need to increase it. > > If you want to extend it, that's true. However, in my opinion, in most > cases you use snprintf() to give a maximum limit to an existing buffer, > and you wouldn't increase its length even if it overflows. This may indeed be the most common case, but from the point of view of the people writing C libraries, they need to cater for as many people as possible. One behaviour satisfies only some people, the other satisfies everyone. > In this (general, IMHO) case, the most interesting piece of information > would be the number of characters actually written, so that you don't have > to go through strlen() again. You don't need strlen(), simply do max(snprintf(...), buffer_size) Cheers Jon