[omniORB] CORBA::string_alloc(len) problem

[Douglas Kosovic]

Hi,

I want to describe a problem with OmniORB's string_alloc() when used in
combination with the String_var's index operator (i.e operator[] ) and a
simple fix for the string_alloc() implementation which will reduce the
number of problems.

Say we have the following code:

  String_var myStr = CORBA::string_alloc(100);

  myStr[0] = 'a';
  myStr[1] = 'b';   // String_var operator[] broken from here
  myStr[2] = '\0';

The operator[] is potentially broken from the second assignment because
in its implementation, it tries to do a strlen on a temporarily non-null
terminated string that contains uninitialised characters ...

Anyway, the fix I suggest for the CORBA::string_alloc(len)
implementation is instead of zeroing just the first char, zero the
entire allocated block, e.g.:
    memset(s, 0, (len + 1) * sizeof(char)) 

Thanks,
Doug.