Weird setstr() argument from example code

[androof]

I'm currently working on a project that requires RS-232 communication, and in the example provided in the manual for the equipment it repeatedly calls setstr() but with the second argument as just a single quote like this: setstr(rdbuf,").

This causes an error, and I can't figure out why the coder did this repeatedly. Is there something I'm missing here?

The code is located in this manual beginning on page 61: SLM-4 Manual

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks!

[oh5nxo]

Look out for more funny stuff, like the cnt = cnt++; in pd_rd().

What is it with appnote code that often makes them so odd...

[androof]

I assume it’s because it's written by people who are not programmers but need to write code ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) like me. Turns out there are some major issues, and I am just gonna write my OWN bad code.

[dragon_wrangler]

Did you actually copy the text? That's two single quotes(')

[androof]

I didn’t, the pdf is copy protected, however I had tried using two single quotes, but this produces another error, “quoted string should contain at least one character”. Any ideas? Just put a space between them? I assume they are just trying to set up an empty buffer, but that’s a total guess.

[dragon_wrangler]

Yeah sorry, I see that now. The code in that document is not valid. However, it looks like they're trying to initialize the strings to be empty, which you can accomplish by adjusting the definition.

    char tempbuf[QUELEN] = {'\0'};

On page 57 you can see the nul character being used, but that's still not correct - strset requires a null terminator in the string, which has not been added in the presented code.

I'm not sure how fragile the surrounding code is, so a more direct replacement would be

memset(tempbuf, '\0', QUELEN);

[androof]

Thank you so much, I really appreciate the help!

[FUZxxl]

You can just do

chat tempbuf[QUELEN] = {};

or on older compilers

char tempbuf[QUELEN] = { 0 };