Memset - Overview of Functions

Overview of Functions

Most of the functions that operate on C strings are defined in the string.h (cstring header in C++). Functions that operate on C wide strings are defined in the wchar.h (cwchar header in C++). These headers also contain declarations of functions used for handling memory buffers; the name is thus something of a misnomer.

Functions declared in string.h are extremely popular since, as a part of the C standard library, they are guaranteed to work on any platform which supports C. However, some security issues exist with these functions, such as buffer overflows, leading programmers to prefer safer, possibly less portable variants, of which some popular ones are listed here. Some of these functions also violate const-correctness by accepting a const string pointer and returning a non-const pointer within the string. To correct this, some have been separated into two overloaded functions in the C++ version of the standard library.

In historical documentation the term "character" was often used instead of "byte" for C strings, which leads many to believe that these functions somehow do not work for UTF-8. In fact all lengths are defined as being in bytes and this is true in all implementations, and these functions work as well with UTF-8 as with any other byte encoding. The BSD documentation has been fixed to make this clear, but POSIX, Linux, and Windows documentation still uses "character" in many places where "byte" or "wchar_t" is the correct term.