Good C string library [closed]

Question

I recently got inspired to start up a project I've been wanting to code for a while. I want to do it in C, because memory handling is key this application. I was searching around for a good implementation of strings in C, since I know me doing it myself could lead to some messy buffer overflows, and I expect to be dealing with a fairly big amount of strings.

I found this article which gives details on each, but they each seem like they have a good amount of cons going for them (don't get me wrong, this article is EXTREMELY helpful, but it still worries me that even if I were to choose one of those, I wouldn't be using the best I can get). I also don't know how up to date the article is, hence my current plea.

What I'm looking for is something that may hold a large amount of characters, and simplifies the process of searching through the string. If it allows me to tokenize the string in any way, even better. Also, it should have some pretty good I/O performance. Printing, and formatted printing isn't quite a top priority. I know I shouldn't expect a library to do all the work for me, but was just wandering if there was a well documented string function out there that could save me some time and some work.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I was asked about the license I prefer. Any sort of open source license will do, but preferably GPL (v2 or v3).

EDIt2: I found betterString (bstring) library and it looks pretty good. Good documentation, small yet versatile amount of functions, and easy to mix with c strings. Anyone have any good or bad stories about it? The only downside I've read about it is that it lacks Unicode (again, read about this, haven't seen it face to face just yet), but everything else seems pretty good.

EDIT3: Also, preferable that its pure C.

Answer 1

It's an old question, I hope you have already found a useful one. In case you didn't, please check out the Simple Dynamic String library on github. I copy&paste the author's description here:

SDS is a string library for C designed to augment the limited libc string handling functionalities by adding heap allocated strings that are:

• Simpler to use.
• Binary safe.
• Computationally more efficient.
• But yet... Compatible with normal C string functions.

This is achieved using an alternative design in which instead of using a C structure to represent a string, we use a binary prefix that is stored before the actual pointer to the string that is returned by SDS to the user.

+--------+-------------------------------+-----------+ | Header | Binary safe C alike string... | Null term | +--------+-------------------------------+-----------+          |          `-> Pointer returned to the user. 

Because of meta data stored before the actual returned pointer as a prefix, and because of every SDS string implicitly adding a null term at the end of the string regardless of the actual content of the string, SDS strings work well together with C strings and the user is free to use them interchangeably with real-only functions that access the string in read-only.