External Development Guide: IDL Internals: String Processing

Setting an IDL_STRING Value

The IDL_StrStore() function should be used to store a null-terminated C string into an IDL_STRING descriptor:

void IDL_StrStore(IDL_STRING *s, char *fs)  

where:

s

Pointer to an IDL_STRING descriptor. This descriptor is assumed to contain garbage, so call IDL_StrDelete() on it first if this is not the case.

fs

Pointer to the null-terminated string to be copied into s.

IDL_StrStore() is useful for placing a string value into an IDL_STRING. This IDL_STRING does not need to be a component of a VARIABLE, which makes this function very flexible.

One often needs a temporary, scalar VARIABLE of type IDL_TYP_STRING with a given value. The function IDL_StrToSTRING() fills this need:

IDL_VPTR IDL_StrToSTRING(char *s)  

where:

s

Pointer to the null-terminated string to be copied into the resulting temporary variable.

  IDL Online Help (March 06, 2007)