Re: get a char array from a _variant_t

From:
"Giovanni Dicanio" <giovanni.dicanio@invalid.it>
Newsgroups:
microsoft.public.vc.mfc
Date:
Wed, 21 Nov 2007 13:22:22 +0100
Message-ID:
<uY6T9kDLIHA.4948@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl>
"clinisbut" <clinisbut@gmail.com> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:bc4d7a41-659d-44cc-a915-01836315ccc3@w28g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...

However, considering that BSTRs are *length-prefixed* strings, they can
also
store NUL bytes, because the total length is determined by the length
field
(which prefixes the string), and not by the first occurrence of the NUL
char.


I know that, but my experience (if I did it correctly) is that if I
send 6 chars, being the fourth 0x00, and with this code:
cs = data.bstrVal;
CString aux;
aux.Format( _T( "c:%d" ), cs.GetLength() );
       MessageBox( aux );
It displays "3".
How could I extract the unsigned long at his start?


I think that the problem in the above code is CString.

You have:

 CString cs;
 cs = data.bstrVal;

When assigning to cs, the CString operator= copies all characters until it
founds the NUL terminating byte(s) (0x00 for ANSI, and 0x00 0x00 for Unicode
UTF-16).

If you want to extract *all* bytes from BSTR, ignoring the zero bytes inside
the string, you should do it by yourself.

If you want to extract BSTR length, you may play a bit with pointers.
You can cast the BSTR to DWORD *, and move one slot back, so addressing the
byte length field, something like this:

  DWORD byteCount = *(((DWORD *)bstr)-1)

Or you can use SysStringByteLen (I prefer this one instead of "pointer
playing"):

  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/ms221097.aspx

You can do something like this:

<code>

 // BSTR bstr;

 // Get byte count in BSTR (excluding terminating NUL character)
 DWORD count = SysStringByteLen( bstr );

 // Access raw BSTR byte data
 BYTE * ptr = static_cast<BYTE *>( bstr );

 // For each byte in BSTR (excluding terminating NUL bytes)
 for ( DWORD i = 0; i < count; i++ )
 {
   BYTE currByte = *ptr;
   // ... process current byte, e.g. add it to a container
   // or print it or do what you want ...

   // Go to next byte
   ptr++;
 }

</code>

Giovanni

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