Question

Okay i am working on someone elses code. They do alot of this:

char description[256]; description[0]=0; 

I know this would put a \0 in the first spot of the character array. But is this even a safe way to erase a string?

Also visual studio keeps reporting memory leaks, and i’ve pretty much tied this done to the strings that are used.

Ps. Yes i know about std::string, yes i use that. This isn’t my code.

Answer 1

To initialize the string to 0, you could do:

char description[256] = {0}; 

that will assign 0 to every element of the array.

Just setting the first element to 0 ('\0') does not erase it’s contents. It doesn’t even guarantee the entire string is set to the null character.

As stated by others, you can’t ‘erase’ statically-created objects until the function closes, when it gets abandoned. Technically, it’s not erased when the function is abandoned either – the stack pointer is merely changed. If you’re paranoid about the data being erased, you should iterate through the array, setting each entry to 0 ('\0').