Implementing a string copy function in C

Question

At a recent job interview, I was asked to implement my own string copy function. I managed to write code that I believe works to an extent. However, when I returned home to try the problem again, I realized that it was a lot more complex than I had thought. Here is the code I came up with:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

char * mycpy(char * d, char * s);

int main() {

  int i;
  char buffer[1];

  mycpy(buffer, "hello world\n");
  printf("%s", buffer);

  return 0;
}

char * mycpy (char * destination, char * source) {

  if (!destination || !source) return NULL;

  char * tmp = destination;

  while (*destination != NULL || *source != NULL) {
    *destination = *source;
    destination++;
    source++;
  }

  return tmp;
}

I looked at some other examples online and found that since all strings in C are null-terminated, I should have read up to the null character and then appended a null character to the destination string before exiting.

However one thing I'm curious about is how memory is being handled. I noticed if I used the strcpy() library function, I could copy a string of 10 characters into a char array of size 1. How is this possible? Is the strcpy() function somehow allocating more memory to the destination?

Answer 1

Good interview question has several layers, to which to candidate can demonstrate different levels of understanding.

On the syntactic 'C language' layer, the following code is from the classic Kernighan and Ritchie book ('The C programming language'):

while( *dest++ = *src++ )
    ;

In an interview, you could indeed point out the function isn't safe, most notably the buffer on *dest isn't large enough. Also, there may be overlap, i.e. if dest points to the middle of the src buffer, you'll have endless loop (which will eventually creates memory access fault).

Answer 2

As the other answers have said, you're overwriting the buffer, so for the sake of your test change it to:

char buffer[ 12 ];

For the job interview they were perhaps hoping for:

char *mycpy( char *s, char *t )
{
    while ( *s++ = *t++ )
    {
        ;
    }
    return s;
}