[philwelch]

Null-terminating arbitrary data to turn it into a string is great--if your arbitrary data doesn't have any 0 bytes in it naturally.

Strtok is just as easily handled by handling strings as a 2-item struct: a size_t for length and a pointer (separating the size data from the character array). In fact, that would kick ass: you can non-destructively tokenize, pass around substring arguments, etc.

[nitrogen]

Storing size separately from the character data, rather than as a prefix to the character data, would indeed alleviate some of the potential problems of a size+data string. I could see myself using such an implementation in situations where the minimal overhead of allocating a separate area on the stack or heap for the size+pointer struct is negligible. Expanding strings would certainly be a lot easier, and it would open the posibility (as you mentioned) for complex data sharing among strings, similarly to Qt4.