[jstimpfle]

"C strings" really aren't anything worth talking about. People take them way too seriously and then complain that they are "unsafe" or "hard to use". Look, C gives you memory to work with and the rest is up to you. Almost the only thing you want from C with regards to strings is string literals.

It should be obvious that most "string" APIs from libc like strcat, strcpy, but especially strtok are ridiculously bad and are only in the libc because of history. Don't use them.

Even strlen() is rarely a good idea to use, and you can (should?) replace strlen("abc") by sizeof "abc" - 1.