Re: strrstr

[Reuben Thomas <rrt at sc3d dot org>]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2008, Roland McGrath wrote:

> What makes you say that strrstr is widely-used and widely-implemented?
> It's not in gnulib, for example, indicating it's not used widely among GNU
> programs.  It's not provided by libc on BSD or Solaris, for example,
> indicating that it's not implemented widely on Unix-like systems.

It's not implemented on many operating systems, it seems (HP-UX being a 
notable exception). It is however implemented in many programs. Google Code 
Search/Google returns about 7,000/3,410 hits for "strrstr" (compared to 
465,000/845,000 for "strstr"), in a wide range of programs, many well known, 
like bash, apache, mysql, tin, gecko, glib,...It's usually in a suggestive 
place in the source tree, like "stdlib" or "lib", suggesting that its 
authors see it as a basic function. (The fact that glib contains it means 
that gnulib need not support it as far as GNOME programs, or anything else 
that uses glib, are concerned.)

It fills an obvious gap in the API (strchr, strrchr; strstr, strrstr), and 
has the same semantics and name pretty much everywhere, so there's no 
contention to resolve in what it should be called or do.

--
http://rrt.sc3d.org/ | romantic, n.  one who puts ideas before people