[Discuss] 'C' string tokenizer for those who hate strtok

[p.willis at telus.net]

Quoting Paul Nienaber <phox at phox.ca>:

> p.willis at telus.net wrote:
> > Quoting p.willis at telus.net:
> >
> >   
> >> Quoting Paul Nienaber <phox at phox.ca>:
> >>
> >>     
> >>> Buffer from nowhere?  POSIX has mandated strtok_r() for like... ever. 
> >>> strtok() _is_ stupid.  It's also about one more line to use strchr() or
> >>> one can use BSD strsep(), or whatever...
> >>>
> >>> ~p
> >>>       
> >> Paul,
> >>
> >> It's fluff. It's a learning excercise for 'C' linked lists for beginners.
> >>
> >> It's entertainment...or would you rather read about partitioning hard
> drives
> >> 200 more times.
> >>
> >> Peter
> >>     
> >
> >
> > I should also note that this technique is better than all 
> > of the above mentioned tokenization routines in that it doesn't
> > destroy the original data. It always makes me wonder about
> > libraries when the actual 'man pages' say to avoid the routine
> > if possible.
> > (ie: strtok, strtok_r, and strsep all come with this warning)
> >
> > A second point regarding the storage is that the deallocation
> > is obviated by this technique reducing memory leaks. But that's
> > splitting hairs since free() also works [most of the time] for
> > some of the other routines.
> >   
> Yeah.  It's way better to allocate another buffer for every token,
> rather than copying the whole thing and delimiting it, which of course
> makes your technique "not better", because it incurs a whole pile more
> calls to malloc() and friends...  </rant>  (but you were the one who
> decided to use the word "better"...)
> 
> I should come clean here and mention that I've taught C at UVic on at
> least one occasion.  I won't even go into the C-specific issues here.
> 
> ~p

How is allocating 5 buffers any different than allocating one?
I'd really like to be informed regarding malloc since most
of the linux system uses it to allocate memory at anything 
above the kernel level. What's wrong with malloc and friends?

I think dynamically allocating memory for storage
is a pretty good idea. That's what programs *should* do.
Otherwise we end up with buffer overrun exploits, etc..

As for C-Specific issues I'm not sure what you mean. 
Does my 'C' code have punctuation problems? :)

Peter