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STL string problems

Started by jkleinecke Aug 12, 2006 at 3:16 AM 17 replies 2.2k views

Original Post

Aug 12, 2006 at 3:16 AM

I've had a strange error crop up recently with STL strings. It seems as though strings are getting 4 bytes of junk data inserted into the beginning of it after passing it as a parameter. For example: Function Prototype: void OpenFile(const std::string& strFile) ; Call: OpenFile("SomeFile.txt") ; After stepping through the debugger I can see that 'strFile' contains a string with contents like this: IIIISomeFile.txt (the 'I's all have a little carat over them). I've narrowed the problem down to the string class because if I change std::string& to char* everything works fine. Has anyone seen this before? I'm 99% certain it's not an ASCII/UNICODE problem but I'm not ruling anything out at this point.

Xetick

Aug 12, 2006 at 3:45 AM

My guess would be that it's the size of the sting. Is the 4 bytes 12 (or possibly 13) in your example?

jkleinecke

Aug 12, 2006 at 3:52 AM

no, the one that I'm looking at is 15 characters. But it doesn't matter, they all seem to be doing that now....

Aardvajk

Aug 12, 2006 at 5:08 AM

How are you using the string? Are you calling s.c_str() to pass it to an fstream object? If not, I'd be inclinded to agree that it is part of the internal representation of the string.

hymerman

Aug 12, 2006 at 5:16 AM

Don't worry about that, I'm quite sure it's part of the internal representation, perhaps some uninitialised memory in the block the string is part of? I get that too when stepping through with the debugger, but everything still works fine and to the outside world there's no trace of the oddly accented Is. So, just don't worry, it's not a problem :)

jkleinecke

Aug 12, 2006 at 1:04 PM

I would agree with you except that it crashes while trying to assign one stl string to another stl string. If everything was working the way it was supposed to I wouldn't worry about it, but as it stands I get some major assertions along the way.

SiCrane

Aug 12, 2006 at 1:07 PM

Try showing a minimal, but complete, code sample that demonstrates your problem. Otherwise all we've got is guesswork to go on.

jkleinecke

Aug 12, 2006 at 1:18 PM

It's a basic memory problem in the string.

std::string g_strSomeString = "" ;void AssignText(const std::string& strText){    g_strSomeString = strText ;}int main(){    AssignText("Foo") ;        return 0 ;}

After executing the above code you would expect that 'g_strSomeString' would contain the value of "Foo". My problem is that during the execution of the above code, 'strText' in 'AssignText' contains "IIIIFoo" and g_strSomeString contains "" because the data at the beginning of 'strText' is junk data. Any Ideas?

SiCrane

Aug 12, 2006 at 1:25 PM

What compiler are you using? Your code sample seems to work just fine under MSVC 2003 and gcc 3.4.4.

jkleinecke

Aug 12, 2006 at 1:32 PM

Visual Studio 2005 Standard

Enigma

Aug 12, 2006 at 1:36 PM

What happens if you actually print out the contents of g_strSomeString before and after the call to AssignText?

What are your compiler settings?

Σnigma

jkleinecke

Aug 12, 2006 at 1:48 PM

Okay, now this is wierd. If I call 'c_str()' on the string it gives me back the proper information. So it looks like the problem is limited to working with just the stl string. For some reason I still can't assign a string to another string.

jkleinecke

Aug 12, 2006 at 2:02 PM

Well, I know the problem exists in my project. I've tried a sandbox application and that works fine.

I'm using standard debug compile and linker settings. I don't really have the option of creating the project fresh because of the size of the codebase (34k lines).

It's unlikely that any of you are going to be able to help me debug the problem. However, I do appreciate the help and if anyone has seen an error like this before, any information you have could be helpful.

Thanks...

Enigma

Aug 12, 2006 at 2:39 PM

Quote:
Original post by jkleinecke
Well, I know the problem exists in my project. I've tried a sandbox application and that works fine.

This almost certainly means you have memory corruption in your project. Set a data watch on the memory which appears to be corrupted to find out where it's being modified.

Σnigma

jkleinecke

Aug 12, 2006 at 3:54 PM

While I don't doubt the memory issue, I don't really think it's a corruption problem. The problem just appeared in the codebase and it first shows up on the first memory allocation that takes place. It's definitely an issue with stl string memory allocation.

Deyja

Aug 12, 2006 at 4:06 PM

I see Í in the MSVC debugger all the time. It means the memory wasn't initialized. In debug builds, everything is initialized to the hex value '0xCDCDCDCD'. 'CD' happens to be the ascii code for the character Í.

jkleinecke

Aug 13, 2006 at 4:43 PM

Ah, that makes sense. What doesn't make sense is why all my strings start 4 bytes into the string buffer...

Zahlman

Aug 14, 2006 at 2:53 AM

Could you possibly have incremented a value one-past-the-end of an array of int* values, such that the first 4 bytes of the string object got incremented by sizeof(int) == 4, where those bytes happen to represent the pointer-to-data in your compiler's std::string implementation? :s

jkleinecke

Aug 14, 2006 at 10:26 AM

While that's always a possibility, it's not likely to be the problem. I create a string to pass into my engine initialization, it's the first allocation and it's immediately wrong. My first guess was that it was a buffer overrun.

I have found a way around the problem though. I have my own memory manager and STL Allocator that plugs into the memory manager. The only STL type I hadn't wrapped was string so I went ahead and did that one as well. Strings are a little bit harder to get right, so it took some work. But after taking all weekend to implement it, I haven't seen that problem. Anyway, thank for all your help.

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