This chapter describes both functions that work on arbitrary arrays or blocks of memory, and functions that are specific to strings and wide strings.
Functions that operate on arbitrary blocks of memory have names
beginning with ‘mem’ and ‘wmem’ (such as memcpy and
wmemcpy) and invariably take an argument which specifies the size
(in bytes and wide characters respectively) of the block of memory to
operate on. The array arguments and return values for these functions
have type void * or wchar_t. As a matter of style, the
elements of the arrays used with the ‘mem’ functions are referred
to as “bytes”. You can pass any kind of pointer to these functions,
and the sizeof operator is useful in computing the value for the
size argument. Parameters to the ‘wmem’ functions must be of type
wchar_t *. These functions are not really usable with anything
but arrays of this type.
In contrast, functions that operate specifically on strings and wide
strings have names beginning with ‘str’ and ‘wcs’
respectively (such as strcpy and wcscpy) and look for a
terminating null byte or null wide character instead of requiring an explicit
size argument to be passed. (Some of these functions accept a specified
maximum length, but they also check for premature termination.)
The array arguments and return values for these
functions have type char * and wchar_t * respectively, and
the array elements are referred to as “bytes” and “wide
characters”.
In many cases, there are both ‘mem’ and ‘str’/‘wcs’ versions of a function. The one that is more appropriate to use depends on the exact situation. When your program is manipulating arbitrary arrays or blocks of storage, then you should always use the ‘mem’ functions. On the other hand, when you are manipulating strings it is usually more convenient to use the ‘str’/‘wcs’ functions, unless you already know the length of the string in advance. The ‘wmem’ functions should be used for wide character arrays with known size.
Some of the memory and string functions take single characters as
arguments. Since a value of type char is automatically promoted
into a value of type int when used as a parameter, the functions
are declared with int as the type of the parameter in question.
In case of the wide character functions the situation is similar: the
parameter type for a single wide character is wint_t and not
wchar_t. This would for many implementations not be necessary
since wchar_t is large enough to not be automatically
promoted, but since the ISO C standard does not require such a
choice of types the wint_t type is used.