Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] What does the "maxlength" argument to "tvb_get_nstringz*" mean?

[Timo Sirainen <tss@xxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2003-04-29 at 18:05, Gerald Combs wrote:
> > 	1) the maximum number of non-'\0' characters copied
> > 	2) the size of the buffer into which the string is being copied.
> I'm leaning towards 2), since it errs on the side of safety.

Yes, and that's the way most other string functions work (snprintf,
strlcpy, etc.).

> Of course, we could avoid the whole mess and use safer strings in the
> first place:
> 
>     http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/glib/glib-strings.html

This would be even better, although I think it's a bit annoying having
to free the strings.

Here's a few other possibilities:

#define INIT_BUFFER(buf) { buf, sizeof(buf) }
char name_buf[256];
buffer_t name = INIT_BUFFER(name_buf);

buffer_append(&name, stuff, 200);
buffer_append(&name, stuff, 200); // fails.

Or with data stack (http://irccrew.org/~cras/security/data-stack.html)
you could skip the char name_buf[256] part.

http://irccrew.org/~cras/security/lib/ has existing pretty small safe
buffer implementation.