Pádraig Brady wrote: > Since there are lots of appending of strings here, > the approach taken in coreutils so far was > to append in a large buffer allocated up front, > or just to write to stdout. > > I guess something in between is more appropriate for a lib. > I.E. efficiently append to a string on the heap. > This is a common operation, so maybe there are routines > in gnulib to use for this? I previously abstracted this operation in: > http://www.pixelbeat.org/libs/sbuf.h > http://www.pixelbeat.org/libs/sbuf.c
In gnulib, we have mostly inlined such operations so far. If you want to add a module 'stringbuffer', similar to the module 'linebuffer' which we already have and which is for input, please do. This is welcome. Back to the function that returns a relativized file name. There are basically 3-4 common return value conventions for functions that need to return a string. - Return a 'char *', to a statically allocated area. (Ex.: strerror) - Return a 'char *', freshly allocated. (Ex.: asprintf) - Pass a buffer and its length. (Ex.: gethostname) - Pass a buffer and a pointer to a length location. (Ex.: unistr.h) I think some of these will also work in combination with a 'stringbuffer', without the need to have an interface that takes a 'string_buffer *' as argument. I wouldn't like to see 'filename-relative' have a dependency on 'stringbuffer', when so many functions who produce a string don't have this dependency. Bruno
