Re: [PATCH 1/3] add strnncmp() function

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 16, 2014, 20:16 UTC
Message-ID: <20140616201644.GN8557@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <58e0ac866bdeb8cc6e06cf553a459af351ccfd1b.1402945507.git.jmmahler@gmail.com>

Jeremiah Mahler wrote:

> Add a strnncmp() function which behaves like strncmp() except it uses
> the length of both strings instead of just one.

The above description isn't very clear to me.  Problems:

 - strncmp compares prefixes of \0-terminated strings.  This function
   compares two binary buffers which can contain \0

 - strncmp is a comparison function and can even be used with functions
   like qsort (for operations like "sort on the first two characters").
   This function returns 0 or nonzero.

Would something like

  /* true if buffers have the same length and are byte-for-byte identical */
  int bufeq(const char *, int, const char *, int);

(or buf_equal, array_equal etc) make sense?