If you're asking what to do about copying strings, then it's either memcpy(), or rarely str[n]cpy(). strcpy when I can assume the source length is safe but don't know the size of the underlying buffer. strncpy when I want to check the return value and maybe issue an error.
For passing references around, I use whatever works. Plain `const char *` argument is certainly a frequent choice for simple name or filepath arguments. That can even mean doing the occasional strlen() when making a copy of that string. It doesn't bother me at all; overall zero-terminated strings are very easy to use. Can't understand why people never stop bitching about it.
When the string is not just an opaque ID, but needs to be examined more closely, it's usually more of a "slicey" or a buffer-processing problem - then I'll add an `int len` to the list of arguments, or to the members in a struct.
Very rarely I'll create a String class, but usually I don't bother. It feels to me like going against the grain of the language. I don't want to create my own host of string processing functions that take this String as argument, when it's usually simpler to operate directly on the data.
Something that I close to never need is the "growable" string class with memory management like std::string. I have no idea right now why I would need such a thing. I tend to write my programs to work on fixed buffers. At most I'll create dynamically sized strings, but a generic string that can grow after creation isn't a frequent use case.
For passing references around, I use whatever works. Plain `const char *` argument is certainly a frequent choice for simple name or filepath arguments. That can even mean doing the occasional strlen() when making a copy of that string. It doesn't bother me at all; overall zero-terminated strings are very easy to use. Can't understand why people never stop bitching about it.
When the string is not just an opaque ID, but needs to be examined more closely, it's usually more of a "slicey" or a buffer-processing problem - then I'll add an `int len` to the list of arguments, or to the members in a struct.
Very rarely I'll create a String class, but usually I don't bother. It feels to me like going against the grain of the language. I don't want to create my own host of string processing functions that take this String as argument, when it's usually simpler to operate directly on the data.
Something that I close to never need is the "growable" string class with memory management like std::string. I have no idea right now why I would need such a thing. I tend to write my programs to work on fixed buffers. At most I'll create dynamically sized strings, but a generic string that can grow after creation isn't a frequent use case.