Mimic Python's strip() function in C

Question

I started on a little toy project in C lately and have been scratching my head over the best way to mimic the strip() functionality that is part of the python string objects

Answer 1

I wrote C code to implement this function. I also wrote a few trivial tests to make sure my function does sensible things.

This function writes to a buffer you provide, and should never write past the end of the buffer, so it should not be prone to buffer overflow security issues.

Note: only Test() uses stdio.h, so if you just need the function, you only need to include ctype.h (for isspace()) and string.h (for strlen()).

// strstrip.c -- implement white space stripping for a string in C
//
// This code is released into the public domain.
//
// You may use it for any purpose whatsoever, and you don't need to advertise
// where you got it, but you aren't allowed to sue me for giving you free
// code; all the risk of using this is yours.



#include 
#include 
#include 



// strstrip() -- strip leading and trailing white space from a string
//
// Copies from sIn to sOut, writing at most lenOut characters.
//
// Returns number of characters in returned string, or -1 on an error.
// If you get -1 back, then nothing was written to sOut at all.

int
strstrip(char *sOut, unsigned int lenOut, char const *sIn)
{
    char const *pStart, *pEnd;
    unsigned int len;
    char *pOut;

    // if there is no room for any output, or a null pointer, return error!
    if (0 == lenOut || !sIn || !sOut)
        return -1;

    pStart = sIn;
    pEnd = sIn + strlen(sIn) - 1;

    // skip any leading whitespace
    while (*pStart && isspace(*pStart))
        ++pStart;

    // skip any trailing whitespace
    while (pEnd >= sIn && isspace(*pEnd))
        --pEnd;

    pOut = sOut;
    len = 0;

    // copy into output buffer
    while (pStart <= pEnd && len < lenOut - 1)
    {
        *pOut++ = *pStart++;
        ++len;
    }


    // ensure output buffer is properly terminated
    *pOut = '\0';
    return len;
}


void
Test(const char *s)
{
    int len;
    char buf[1024];

    len = strstrip(buf, sizeof(buf), s);

    if (!s)
        s = "**null**";  // don't ask printf to print a null string
    if (-1 == len)
        *buf = '\0';  // don't ask printf to print garbage from buf

    printf("Input: \"%s\"  Result: \"%s\" (%d chars)\n", s, buf, len);
}


main()
{
    Test(NULL);
    Test("");
    Test(" ");
    Test("    ");
    Test("x");
    Test("  x");
    Test("  x   ");
    Test("  x y z   ");
    Test("x y z");
}