SDL_strnstr(3)

💖 SDL_strnstr 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the SDL3 FUNCTIONS section of the manual, and today's main character is SDL_strnstr — she finds your substring and she does it with a limit, which is honestly iconic behaviour ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

SDL_strnstr — search a string, up to n bytes, for the first instance of a specific substring 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

#include <SDL3/SDL_stdinc.h>

char * SDL_strnstr(const char *haystack, const char *needle, size_t maxlen);

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so here's the vibe: the search ends the second one of these three things happens —

• it finds the substring you asked for, or
• it hits a null terminator byte that ends the string, or
• it has examined maxlen bytes 🎀

which means — and this is the part that's giving very flexible, very generous — it is possible to use this function on a string without a null terminator. no terminator? no problem, she just counts bytes instead. periodt 💜

also note (lowkey important): this looks for strings of _bytes_, not _characters_. so it's totally legal to search for malformed and incomplete UTF-8 sequences. she does not judge your encoding, she does not fix it, she just matches bytes fr fr 🙈

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🫶 FUNCTION PARAMETERS 🫶

• haystack — the string to search. Must not be NULL. like, genuinely, do not.
• needle — the string to search for. Must not be NULL. same energy, same rule.
• maxlen — the maximum number of bytes to search in haystack. this is your budget, bestie, spend it wisely ⭐

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👑 RETURN VALUE 👑

returns a pointer to the first instance of needle in the string, or NULL if it's not found 😭

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🌈 THREAD SAFETY 🌈

it is safe to call this function from any thread. go off, multitask, she's not scared 💖

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⭐ AVAILABILITY ⭐

this function is available since SDL 3.2.0 🎀

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and that's the whole page, no cap 🧚 from your friends at Simple Directmedia Layer, version SDL 3.4.18 — this was the SDL_strnstr(3) manual page, ty for coming to my ted talk, ily, bye 💅🌸