strntoul

Introduction

strntoul is a library adding the "missing" strntol and strntoul interfaces from the C Standard Library which convert a bounded, potentially non-null-terminated string to a long or unsigned long integer, respectively.

These functions are similar to their C99 standard peers, strtol and strtoul, except that they will use at most the specified, bounded number of bytes from the specified string, which need not be null-terminated if it contains the specified number or more bytes.

These functions can be useful for parsing files or text-based protocol streams without the need to copy and/or null-terminate such data using functions such as strtok or strtok_r.

Getting Started with strntoul

Building strntoul

If you are not using a prebuilt distribution of strntoul, building strntoul should be a straightforward, two- or three-step process. If you are building from the main branch, start with:

% ./bootstrap

If you are building from the main branch, a release branch, or a distribution package, continue (main branch) or start with:

% ./configure
% make

The first bootstrap step creates the configure script and Makefile.in files from configure.ac and Makefile.am respectively and only needs to be done once unless those input files have changed.

The second configure step generates Makefile files from Makefile.in files and only needs to be done once unless those input files have changed.

Although not strictly necessary, the additional step of sanity checking the build results is recommended:

% make check

Dependencies

In addition to depending on the C Standard Library, strntoul depends on:

• nlunit-test

However, nlunit-test is only required when building and running the strntoul unit test suite.

If you want to modify or otherwise maintain the strntoul build system, see "Maintaining strntoul" below for more information.

Installing strntoul

To install strntoul for your use simply invoke:

% make install

to install strntoul in the location indicated by the --prefix configure option (default "/usr/local"). If you intended an arbitrarily relocatable strntoul installation and passed --prefix=/ to configure, then you might use DESTDIR to, for example install strntoul in your user directory:

% make DESTIDIR="${HOME}" install

Maintaining strntoul

If you want to maintain, enhance, extend, or otherwise modify strntoul, it is likely you will need to change its build system, based on GNU autotools, in some circumstances.

After any change to the strntoul build system, including any Makefile.am files or the configure.ac file, you must run the bootstrap or bootstrap-configure (which runs both bootstrap and configure in one shot) script to update the build system.

Dependencies

Due to its leverage of GNU autotools, if you want to modify or otherwise maintain the strntoul build system, the following additional packages are required and are invoked by bootstrap:

• autoconf
• automake
• libtool

Linux

On Debian-based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, these dependencies can be satisfied with the following:

% sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool

Mac OS X

On Mac OS X, these dependencies can be installed and satisfied using Brew:

% brew install autoconf automake libtool

Interact

There are numerous avenues for strntoul support:

• Bugs and feature requests — submit to the Issue Tracker

Versioning

strntoul follows the Semantic Versioning guidelines for release cycle transparency and to maintain backwards compatibility.

License

strntoul is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for more information.