logoalt Hacker News

PlunderBunnyyesterday at 9:40 PM3 repliesview on HN

I worked on a Win32 app that used space-padded strings, i.e. the destination string was padded with spaces, but there was still a null on the last byte. You had to use special versions of the string functions for length, copy etc.

I’m not sure why this was - the source base was so old it might have had its origins in Pascal struct behaviour.


Replies

jkfkfkjyesterday at 10:33 PM

It can perhaps be due to the string originating from a sql database ”char” field, I.e. not ”varchar”. Char fields in databases are space padded.

bebe83939yesterday at 10:06 PM

Perhaps prevent realocation when string size changes? Or aligning cpu cache lines?

egorfineyesterday at 9:47 PM

I think this behavior has its roots in COBOL, not pascal.

show 1 reply