Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > While discussing [1], I noticed that the grep code mostly takes > non-const buffers, even though it is conceptually a read-only operation > to search in them. The culprit is a handful of spots that temporarily > tie off NUL-terminated strings by overwriting a byte of the buffer and > then restoring it. But I think we no longer need to do so these days, > now that we have a regexec_buf() that can take a ptr/size pair. Yes, the haystack has not been read-only exactly because we didn't have <ptr,size> based regexec variant when the grep machinery was written, and there is no reason why we want to use the "temporarily terminate by swapping the byte with a NUL" trick. It always is a pleasure to read such a concise and to-the-point summary. With a clear summary like that, a reader almost does not have to see the patch to guess how the rest of the story goes ;-)
