Question about strings

This doesn't sound like any standard C++ type.

What is the other language?

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Original post by DaBookshah Question - What is this type of string called in c++?

It's not called anything, it doesn't exist, as Fruny said.

The other language sounds like Pascal to me, that's the only language I know of that prefixes the string with the length (And this was about 10 years ago...)

I've been known to call them Pascal strings, but I don't think you can have that specific representation in C++. You'll have to fudge it with a structure and some pointer arithmetic. The best I can come up with is to allocate your c-string with an extra four bytes, and then offset your pointer by four.

void SomeFunctionThatWantsAPascalString(char* string){   int length = *(int*)(string - 4);   cout << length << " \"" << string << "\"" << endl;}int main(){    char* CString = "hello world";    char* PascalString = new char[strlen(CString) + 4 + 1];    //is the string really still null terminated, by the way?    strcpy(&PascalString[4], "hello world");    *((__int32*)PascalString) = (__int32)strlen(CString)+1;    SomeFunctionThatWantsAPascalString(&PascalString[4]);    delete[] PascalString;    return 0;}

Naturally, you'd do well to wrap all the nasties up in some functions. Possibly even just use std::string with a CreatePascalString function that is called just before passing the memory to your library.

CM

Thanks. Just for anyone whoose interested, the language is a piece of crap known as "Visual Dataflex 7". Evil Steve's figure of about 10 years is pretty close.

Weird. Why would it need both a length AND a terminator?

In one of his columns Joel Spolesky called them f***ed strings. And I would tend to agree with him on that one, since it's silly to have both a pascal-style(with the size prefixing the string) and c-style(null-terminated) in one string.

There's no need to have both. The primary reason for using pascal strings is speed (strlen is O(1) not O(n) ) and the primary reason for c-strings is that pascal strings were originally only prefixed with one byte for length, so you couldn't have strings longer than 256 chars. Plus null-terminated strings worked well on the PDP-11, when C was designed :)

With a 4-byte length field, and more modern comps than the PDP-11, the reason for null-terminated strings is gone.

seems like a compatibility hack to me. you could just pass such a a pointer to a C funktion, without convertion. Could be a pain though, if the C function manipulates the string.

Quote:

Original post by DaBookshah a four byte length field, followed by the null-terminated ascii string itself.

GCC implements std::string in a very similar way, but has 3 fields preceding the actual string: length, capacity, refcount. It is null-terminated too.