Question

I’m going through K&R and 3-2 looks like it would be easy to get into a buffer overflow

Write a function escape(s,t) that converts characters like newline and tab into visible escape sequences like \n and \t as it copies the string t to s. Use a switch

If I replace the byte ‘\n’ with ‘\’ and ‘n’, the size of s could potentially be quite a bit bigger than the source string.

I could just write this program and ignore the overflow but I would rather not.

I’m having issue wrapping my head around how to handle this?

I’m thinking having a fixed buffer size, perhaps something out of limit.h, and flushing the buffer to stdio when it gets full?

Answer 1

I believe the entire point of the exercise is to teach you that when you’re dealing with something like this you either need to:

1. Shoot too high (make a buffer double the size of the original)
2. Take extra time (an extra pass) and pre-compute the required size of the buffer.