The Better String Library

Caution: Work In Progress

Fixed by contributors according to the project issues. The open pull requests were merged into the master branch.

What is it?

The Better String Library (or Bstrlib) is an abstraction of a string data type which is superior to the C library char buffer string type, or C++'s std::string.

Features

Among the features achieved are:

• Substantial mitigation of buffer overflow/overrun problems and other failures that result from erroneous usage of the common C string library functions

• Significantly simplified string manipulation

• High performance interoperability with other source/libraries which expect '\0' terminated char buffers

• Improved overall performance of common string operations

• Functional equivalency with other more modern languages

The library is totally stand alone, portable (known to work with gcc/g++, MSVC++, Intel C++, WATCOM C/C++, Turbo C, Borland C++, IBM's native CC compiler on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X), high performance, easy to use and is not part of some other collection of data structures. Even the file I/O functions are totally abstracted (so that other stream-like mechanisms, like sockets, can be used.) Nevertheless, it is adequate as a complete replacement of the C string library for string manipulation in any C program.

The library includes a robust C++ wrapper that uses overloaded operators, rich constructors, exceptions, stream I/O and STL to make the CBString struct a natural and powerful string abstraction with more functionality and higher performance than std::string.

The development stage

Bstrlib is stable, well tested and suitable for any software production environment.