Re: [VOTE]strn(case)cmp supporting a negative length as its third paramter

On 08/14/2011 02:03 PM, Stas Malyshev wrote: > Hi! > > On 8/14/11 11:40 AM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: >> My main issue with changing strncmp/strncasecmp is that these are >> currently exact mappings of the underlying libc functions. For people > > And why should anybody care? 99% of people using PHP never used a libc > function and can hardly tell libc from gcc. If we can extend this > function with useful functionality, nobody cares about what libc does. > >> For example, I could imagine people writing code along these lines: >> >> $len = strlen($user_data) - strlen($suffix); >> if(!strncmp($user_data, $string, $len)) { >> // do something >> } > > Warning doesn't fix the bug - and unless you're in 0.0001% of the > population that actually reads the logs daily and checks every message > there it would be little to help you. We should have more useful > functions, not more warnings. Warning won't make this code to work. I agree, however this change would potentially change the return value of the function. Before it would warn and not match. Even if you never saw the warning, at least length -1 would not give you a match. Now if the user data happens to end with the right character we now have a string match which is not at all what the code was written to do. -Rasmus