strlen

Let's make it somewhat more readable: int token_length = strlen(token); int input_length = strlen(input); int match_count = 0; // for constant-time comparison...

Could (and should) a safer language pre-empt that you should first check strlen(str)!= 0 before doing strcmp?

You could disallow embedded nulls, but then the length prefix is just there as a place to cache strlen calls?

In any case, it does utf-8 code point strlen at 16 GB/s at this point.

Anyway, to limit the damage I make versions of malloc, strlen and sizeof which return or take ptrdiff_t.

There were several hundred places where the return value of strlen was being assigned to a short, every one of which created a warning.

I've even seen things like strncpy(dest, src, strlen(src)); which is certainly no safer than strcpy().

No need to constantly strlen source strings to check the length -- which in itself can cause a segfault if they are not null terminated.

So, strlen, for example, is a function, and printf is a procedure.

The code was littered with strncpy(a, b, strlen(b)).

I heard later that it took four senior devs a week to track down the cause, and much head-scratching because strlen was documented to return an int.

I once #defined strlen to return a short.

Buffer overflow in `error` function (buf holds 128 bytes but 128 + strlen("error: ") bytes could be copied to it).

And then you'd need to "convert" a regular string into one of those by using some function that forced you to handle the strlen(str) == 0 case.

He OK'd it because, as he said, "strlen returns as short on the Mac anyway, and since our code runs on Mac as well as Windows it's a limitation we have to respect anyways." A few years later the company stopped supporting the Mac.

Strlen (for storage space) would be dramatically slower than in any other format.