Re: g_utf8_validate() and NUL characters

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

Maciej Katafiasz wrote:
> Den Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:55:29 -0400 skrev Behdad Esfahbod:
>> Ugh.  Why is that?  Who knows?  Matthias suggested that because a string
>> claiming to be length bytes long but terminating prematurely is not
>> valid. However, that statement assumes that string is nul-terminated.
> 
> That is indeed very ugly, and seems to me like a particularly unfortunate 
> case of implementation guts spilling out onto the public API and then 
> getting documented as invariants :(. Personally I can't think of a single 
> reason not to allow NULs if that was the consistent design decision 
> across the stack;

Sure, but the lower levels of the C stack have already established the
rule that a char * is assumed to be NUL-terminated, and methods that
take both a char * and a length (strncpy(), strncmp(), strndup(), etc)
do so to let you stop before the NUL, not to let you keep going after
the NUL.

-- Dan