Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Regarding Memory allocation

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 10:38:49 -0800
Jaap Keuter wrote:


From README.developer


   If you're setting it to a string you've constructed, or will be
   appending to the column later, use "col_add_str()".

So it all depends on how you _start_ filling the column. If it's already
filled using col_set_str(pinfo->cinfo, COL_INFO, "Blah"); you'll need to
clear it first, like so:

    col_clear(pinfo->cinfo, COL_INFO);
No, you don't need to - that note from README.developer is an optimization hint, not a strict requirement.
The problem is that "col_set_str()" just sets a pointer, it doesn't copy the string - but if you're going to append to the column, a copy has to be made of the string to a buffer, because "col_append_str()" and "col_append_fstr()" can't just append to the string passed in the "col_set_str()" call. If it's going to copy the string anyway, you might as well use "col_add_str()" and do the copy up front.