How to get rid of "unsafe" warnings / errors in Visual Studio (strcpy, sprintf, strdup)

Question

I'm trying to get rid of some compiler warnings that say strcpy, sprintf, etc are unsafe. I get why they're unsafe, but I can't think of a good way to fix the code, in a C++ style.

Here's a excerpt of the code:

extList->names[i]=(char *)malloc(length*sizeof(char)); strcpy(extList->names[i],extName);                     // unsafe // strncpy(extList->names[i],extName,length);          // also unsafe 

Here's the message:

C4996: 'strcpy': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using strcpy_s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details.

I can't think of a safe way to copy the data over in C++ without knowing the length of the stuff to copy. I know there's strlen(), but that's also unsafe since it assumes (maybe incorrectly) that the data is null-terminated.

Also:

// used to concatenate: sprintf(extStr,"%s%s",platExtStr,glExtStr); 

C4996: 'sprintf': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using sprintf_s instead. To disable deprecation, use _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS. See online help for details.

Using std::string to concatenate is easy enough, but then I need to get the data into extStr somehow (and not using strcpy, lol). The string::c_str() function returns a pointer to un-modifiable data, so I can't just set extStr equal to it. (And I'm not even sure if the c_str() pointer needs delete called on it later? Does it allocate space using "new"?)

Any advice on this stuff? This is part of a 10,000 line file that's not mine... so I'm not exactly keen on re-writing the thing in the C++ way.

Answer 1

You don't really need pragmas to disable them.

For win32/msvc, in ProjectProperties -> Configuration Properties -> C/C++ -> Preprocessor -> Preprocessor Definitions, add following macros:

_CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE   _CRT_NONSTDC_NO_DEPRECATE 

Or you can pass thos in command line parameters (-D_CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE). You can probably #define them at the beginning of certain *.cpp files. Also, there are probably more of them (see crtdefs.h - looks like there are a lot of them...). Those kind of warnings normally tell you with which macros you can disable them - just read compiler output.