strstr(3bsd)

💖 strstr(3bsd) — the LOCAL girlies' guide 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to strstr(3bsd), from the <cyan>LOCAL</cyan> section — yes she's local, she's niche, she's that girl 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

strnstr — locate a substring in a string 🔍

📚 LIBRARY 📚

Utility functions from BSD systems, aka libbsd, and you link her with -lbsd 💅

🧚 SYNOPSIS 🧚

#include <string.h>
(See libbsd(7) for include usage.)

char *
strnstr(const char *big, const char *little, size_t len);

yes you literally need to peep libbsd(7) for the include usage, i don't make the rules, i just report them 🫶

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so the way strnstr() works is: she goes looking for the first occurrence of the null-terminated string little inside the string big, and she only searches not more than len characters. that's the whole vibe check ✨

anything that shows up after a '\0' character? not searched. periodt. she stops caring right there 💀

and listen — strnstr() is a FreeBSD specific API, so it should only be used when portability is not a concern. if you're trying to be portable bestie, this is not the function for you 😭

🎀 RETURN VALUES 🎀

here's the tea on what she gives you back:

• if little is an empty string, you get big back. iconic behavior honestly 💖
• if little occurs nowhere in big, you get NULL. sad. tragic. we move on 🙈
• otherwise? you get a pointer to the first character of the first occurrence of little. slay ✨👑

🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

okay so this next one sets the pointer ptr to NULL, because only the first 4 characters of largestring are searched. watch 👀

const char *largestring = "Foo Bar Baz";
const char *smallstring = "Bar";
char *ptr;

ptr = strnstr(largestring, smallstring, 4);

she searched four characters. "Bar" was not in those four characters. therefore: NULL. no cap. 💀

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• strstr(3)
• strcasestr(3)
• memchr(3)
• memmem(3)
• strchr(3)
• strcspn(3)
• strpbrk(3)
• strrchr(3)
• strsep(3)
• strspn(3)
• strtok(3)
• wcsstr(3)

a whole friend group honestly, go say hi 🫶

🌈 HISTORY 🌈

strnstr() originated in FreeBSD. her origin story, her lore, her main character energy 🌟

kisses bestie, this page came to you from Debian, dated October 11, 2001 — yes she's been serving since 2001 and she's still eating 💅✨ mwah 💖