convert c++ to vb.net - c++

i have this cpp code that i need an equvalent in vb.net or at leat know what its doing so i can figure out a conversion myself
const char * CResult::strnchr(const char *str, int len, char c) const
{
if (!str)
return NULL;
const char *p = str;
while (len > 0)
{
if (!*p)
return NULL;
if (*p == c)
return p;
p++;
len--;
}
return NULL;
}
and this one
memcmp(prevprev, "ANY", 3)
thank you

strnchr -- Find a character in a length limited string
See this. You can do the same thing in VB.net using String.IndexOf, e.g.
Dim myString As String = "ABCDE"
Dim myInteger As Integer
myInteger = myString.IndexOf("D") ' myInteger = 3
Example copied from MSDN.

strnchr finds the location of the first occurrence of char c in string str. It returns a pointer to the character, which you cannot do in VB.Net, the closest you can do is get the offset of the character from the start of the string.
memcmp(prevprev, "ANY", 3) compares the three letters of "ANY" to the memory location at prevprev, effectively checking that prevprev contains a substring of ANY.
In VB.Net the first can be accomplished with the IndexOf member of the String type.
The second you need to use SubString (again a member on the String type) to create a sub string of the string and check is it equal to "ANY".
Dim myString As String = "Any Hello World"
Dim AnyAtStart As Boolean = myString.SubString(0, 3) = "ANY") ' Will be true '
Dim AnyAtSecond As Boolean = myString.SubString(1, 3) = "ANY") ' Will be false '

Finding VB.NET analogs or closely corresponding functions for many standard C functions is relatively simple using MSDN. Take memcmp() as example:
- MSDN source memcmp, wmemcmp - "Compare characters in two buffers."
- Find strings' comparison method in VB.NET - String.Compare Method (String, String)
But copying C source function by function into VB.NET can produce a strangely ineffective code for relatively small programs. And you will be puzzled every time looking for replacement of raw pointers used everywhere in C programs.
P.S. And what would you do if your ::strnchr will be called differently from standard C function strnchr() - "Find a character in a string."?

Related

String Rev function, strange behavior for out of bounds exception (c++)

I played with the string function,i wrote the following one, obviously I set the first character in the ret string to be written in a place that is out of bounds, but instead of an exception, I get a string that has one extra place .
std::string StringManipulations::rev(std::string s)
{
std::string ret(s.size(), ' ');
for (int i = 0; i < s.size(); i++)
{
std::string ch;
ch.push_back(s[i]);
int place = s.size() -i;
ret.replace(place,1,ch);
}
return ret;
}
I write by mistake in a position that corresponds to a place that is one larger than the original string size that I assign at the beginning of the function.
Why don't we get an error ?
s = StringManipulations::rev("abcde");
std::cout << s.size();
std::cout << s;
output is : 6 _edcba
any help ?
solved: adding ch as a String adds a null terminator automatically, and by doing so we can get a new string with size+1.
C++ has a zero-overhead rule.
This means that no overhead, (like checking if an index is in-bounds) should be done unintentionally.
You don't get an exception because c++ simply doesn't verify if the index is valid.
For the extra character, this might have something to do with (regular) c strings.
In c, strings are arrays of type char (char*) without a defined size.
The end of a string is denoted with a null terminator.
C++ strings are backwards compatible, meaning that they have a null terminator too.
It's possible that you replaced the terminator with an other character but the next byte was also a zero meaning that you added one more char.
In addition to the information above about null terminators, another answer to your question is that the docs says it will only throw if the position is greater than the string size, rather than beyond the end of the string.
string replace api

Converting a Lua function chunk to a C string

I am working on a project that takes a Lua string and converts it into a C string – not at all difficult, of course. However, I run into trouble when attempting to convert a binary representation of a function, i.e. one produced by a call to string.dump, to a C string. I am having trouble reading the entire string.
While it is not the ultimate goal of the project, consider the following simple example where I print out the characters in a string one-by-one using a C function called chars that I have registered for use in Lua:
static void chars(char* cp) {
char* pointer = cp;
while (*pointer) {
printf("%c\n", *pointer);
++pointer;
}
return;
}
static int lua_chars(lua_State* L) {
lua_len(L, 1);
size_t len = static_cast<size_t>(lua_tonumber(L, -1)) + 1;
lua_pop(L, 1);
if (len > 0) {
char* cp = static_cast<char*>(malloc(len));
strcat(cp, lua_tostring(L, 1));
chars(cp);
free(cp);
}
return 0;
}
Calling chars from a Lua script would look like this:
chars("Hello World!")
and would print out the characters one by one with each followed by a newline.
Now to the actual issue. Consider this example where I declare a function in Lua, dump it with string.dump, and then pass that string to the function chars to print out its characters individually:
local function foo()
print("foo")
return
end
local s = assert(string.dump(foo))
chars(s)
The string s in its entirety, not printed with my function chars, looks something like this:
uaS?
xV(w#=stdin#A#$#&?&?printfoo_ENV
However, chars only prints the first five bytes:
u
a
S
(Note there are supposed to be two lines of whitespace before the 'u'.)
I am almost certain that this is due to null characters within the string, which I think interferes with lua_tostring's functionality. I have come across lua_Writer for reading chunks, but I have no idea how to use/code it. How can I successfully convert the entire string on the Lua stack to a C string?
I am almost certain that this is due to null characters within the
string
Yes, it's exactly because Lua strings can contain zeroes.
which I think interferes with lua_tostring's functionality.
And this is false. lua_tostring() works as intended. It's just strcat() you're using will only copy the data up to the nearest zero byte.
If you need to copy the string, use memcpy, passing it both the pointer to Lua string data and Lua string length (lua_len, lua_rawlen, etc).
But just for printing you don't even need to copy anything. Pass the len variable as an argument to chars(), and check that length instead of waiting for zero byte.
The Problem isn't lua_tostring but strcat which copies until it finds an null characters. Same Problem with your chars function.
That should work:
memcpy(cp, lua_tostring(L, 1), len);
chars(cp, len);
...
static void chars(char* cp, size_t len) {
for (size_t i = 0; i < len; ++i, ++cp) {
putchar(*cp);
}
}

C++ tolower/toupper char pointer

Do you guys know why the following code crash during the runtime?
char* word;
word = new char[20];
word = "HeLlo";
for (auto it = word; it != NULL; it++){
*it = (char) tolower(*it);
I'm trying to lowercase a char* (string). I'm using visual studio.
Thanks
You cannot compare it to NULL. Instead you should be comparing *it to '\0'. Or better yet, use std::string and never worry about it :-)
In summary, when looping over a C-style string. You should be looping until the character you see is a '\0'. The iterator itself will never be NULL, since it is simply pointing a place in the string. The fact that the iterator has a type which can be compared to NULL is an implementation detail that you shouldn't touch directly.
Additionally, you are trying to write to a string literal. Which is a no-no :-).
EDIT:
As noted by #Cheers and hth. - Alf, tolower can break if given negative values. So sadly, we need to add a cast to make sure this won't break if you feed it Latin-1 encoded data or similar.
This should work:
char word[] = "HeLlo";
for (auto it = word; *it != '\0'; ++it) {
*it = tolower(static_cast<unsigned char>(*it));
}
You're setting word to point to the string literal, but literals are read-only, so this results in undefined behavior when you assign to *it. You need to make a copy of it in the dynamically-allocated memory.
char *word = new char[20];
strcpy(word, "HeLlo");
Also in your loop you should compare *it != '\0'. The end of a string is indicated by the character being the null byte, not the pointer being null.
Given code (as I'm writing this):
char* word;
word = new char[20];
word = "HeLlo";
for (auto it = word; it != NULL; it++){
*it = (char) tolower(*it);
This code has Undefined Behavior in 2 distinct ways, and would have UB also in a third way if only the text data was slightly different:
Buffer overrun.
The continuation condition it != NULL will not be false until the pointer it has wrapped around at the end of the address range, if it does.
Modifying read only memory.
The pointer word is set to point to the first char of a string literal, and then the loop iterates over that string and assigns to each char.
Passing possible negative value to tolower.
The char classification functions require a non-negative argument, or else the special value EOF. This works fine with the string "HeLlo" under an assumption of ASCII or unsigned char type. But in general, e.g. with the string "Blåbærsyltetøy", directly passing each char value to tolower will result in negative values being passed; a correct invocation with ch of type char is (char) tolower( (unsigned char)ch ).
Additionally the code has a memory leak, by allocating some memory with new and then just forgetting about it.
A correct way to code the apparent intent:
using Byte = unsigned char;
auto to_lower( char const c )
-> char
{ return Byte( tolower( Byte( c ) ) ); }
// ...
string word = "Hello";
for( char& ch : word ) { ch = to_lower( ch ); }
There are already two nice answers on how to solve your issues using null terminated c-strings and poitners. For the sake of completeness, I propose you an approach using c++ strings:
string word; // instead of char*
//word = new char[20]; // no longuer needed: strings take care for themseves
word = "HeLlo"; // no worry about deallocating previous values: strings take care for themselves
for (auto &it : word) // use of range for, to iterate through all the string elements
it = (char) tolower(it);
Its crashing because you are modifying a string literal.
there is a dedicated functions for this
use
strupr for making string uppercase and strlwr for making the string lower case.
here is an usage example:
char str[ ] = "make me upper";
printf("%s\n",strupr(str));
char str[ ] = "make me lower";
printf("%s\n",strlwr (str));

How to check the contents of a LPTSTR string?

I'm trying to understand why a segmentation fault (SIGSEGV) occurs during the execution of this piece of code. This error occurs when testing the condition specified in the while instruction, but it does not occur at the first iteration, but at the second iteration.
LPTSTR arrayStr[STR_COUNT];
LPTSTR inputStr;
LPTSTR str;
// calls a function from external library
// in order to set the inputStr string
set_input_str(param1, (char*)&inputStr, param3);
str = inputStr;
while( *str != '\0' )
{
if( debug )
printf("String[%d]: %s\n", i, (char*)str);
arrayStr[i] = str;
str = str + strlen((char*)str) + 1;
i++;
}
After reading this answer, I have done some research on the internet and found this article, so I tried to modify the above code, using this piece of code read in this article (see below). However, this change did not solve the problem.
for (LPTSTR pszz = pszzStart; *pszz; pszz += lstrlen(pszz) + 1) {
... do something with pszz ...
}
As assumed in this answer, it seems that the code expects double null terminated arrays of string. Therefore, I wonder how I could check the contents of the inputStr string, in order to check if it actually contains only one null terminator char.
NOTE: the number of characters in the string printed from printf instruction is twice the value returned by the lstrlen(str) function call at the first iteration.
OK, now that you've included the rest of the code it is clear that it is indeed meant to parse a set of consecutive strings. The problem is that you're mixing narrow and wide string types. All you need to do to fix it is change the variable definitions (and remove the casts):
char *arrayStr[STR_COUNT];
char *inputStr;
char *str;
// calls a function from external library
// in order to set the inputStr string
set_input_str(param1, &inputStr, param3);
str = inputStr;
while( *str != '\0' )
{
if( debug )
printf("String[%d]: %s\n", i, str);
arrayStr[i] = str;
str = str + strlen(str) + 1;
i++;
}
Specifically, the issue was occurring on this line:
while( *str != '\0' )
since you hadn't cast str to char * the comparison was looking for a wide nul rather than a narrow nul.
str = str + strlen(str) + 1;
You go out of bounds, change to
str = str + 1;
or simply:
str++;
Of course you are inconsistently using TSTR and strlen, the latter assuming TCHAR = char
In any case, strlen returns the length of the string, which is the number of characters it contains not including the nul character.
Your arithmetic is out by one but you know you have to add one to the length of the string when you allocate the buffer.
Here however you are starting at position 0 and adding the length which means you are at position len which is the length of the string. Now the string runs from offset 0 to offset len - 1 and offset len holds the null character. Offset len + 1 is out of bounds.
Sometimes you might get away with reading it, if there is extra padding, but it is undefined behaviour and here you got a segfault.
This looks to me like code that expects double null terminated arrays of strings. I suspect that you are passing a single null terminated string.
So you are using something like this:
const char* inputStr = "blah";
but the code expects two null terminators. Such as:
const char* inputStr = "blah\0";
or perhaps an input value with multiple strings:
const char* inputStr = "foo\0bar\0";
Note that these final two strings are indeed double null terminated. Although only one null terminator is written explicitly at the end of the string, the compiler adds another one implicitly.
Your question edit throws a new spanner in the works? The cast in
strlen((char*)str)
is massively dubious. If you need to cast then the cast must be wrong. One wonders what LPTSTR expands to for you. Presumably it expands to wchar_t* since you added that cast to make the code compile. And if so, then the cast does no good. You are lying to the compiler (str is not char*) and lying to the compiler never ends well.
The reason for the segmentation fault is already given by Alter's answer. However, I'd like to add that the usual style of parsing a C-style string is more elegant and less verbose
while (char ch = *str++)
{
// other instructions
// ...
}
The scope of ch is only within in the body of the loop.
Aside: Either tag the question as C or C++ but not both, they're different languages.

Why am i getting two different strings?

I wrote a very simple encryption program to practice c++ and i came across this weird behavior. When i convert my char* array to a string by setting the string equal to the array, then i get a wrong string, however when i create an empty string and add append the chars in the array individually, it creates the correct string. Could someone please explain why this is happening, i just started programming in c++ last week and i cannot figure out why this is not working.
Btw i checked online and these are apparently both valid ways of converting a char array to a string.
void expandPassword(string* pass)
{
int pHash = hashCode(pass);
int pLen = pass->size();
char* expPass = new char[264];
for (int i = 0; i < 264; i++)
{
expPass[i] = (*pass)[i % pLen] * (char) rand();
}
string str;
for (int i = 0; i < 264; i++)
{
str += expPass[i];// This creates the string version correctly
}
string str2 = expPass;// This creates much shorter string
cout <<str<<"\n--------------\n"<<str2<<"\n---------------\n";
delete[] expPass;
}
EDIT: I removed all of the zeros from the array and it did not change anything
When copying from char* to std::string, the assignment operator stops when it reaches the first NULL character. This points to a problem with your "encryption" which is causing embedded NULL characters.
This is one of the main reasons why encoding is used with encrypted data. After encryption, the resulting data should be encoded using Hex/base16 or base64 algorithms.
a c-string as what you are constructing is a series of characters ending with a \0 (zero) ascii value.
in the case of
expPass[i] = (*pass)[i % pLen] * (char) rand();
you may be inserting \0 into the array if the expression evaluates to 0, as well as you do not append a \0 at the end of the string either to assure it being a valid c-string.
when you do
string str2 = expPass;
it can very well be that the string gets shorter since it gets truncated when it finds a \0 somewhere in the string.
This is because str2 = expPass interprets expPass as a C-style string, meaning that a zero-valued ("null") byte '\0' indicates the end of the string. So, for example, this:
char p[2];
p[0] = 'a';
p[1] = '\0';
std::string s = p;
will cause s to have length 1, since p has only one nonzero byte before its terminating '\0'. But this:
char p[2];
p[0] = 'a';
p[1] = '\0';
std::string s;
s += p[0];
s += p[1];
will cause s to have length 2, because it explicitly adds both bytes to s. (A std::string, unlike a C-style string, can contain actual null bytes — though it's not always a good idea to take advantage of that.)
I guess the following line cuts your string:
expPass[i] = (*pass)[i % pLen] * (char) rand();
If rand() returns 0 you get a string terminator at position i.