Yesterday I’d come across an interesting glitch which confused me for a while.

I was debugging a brand new online assembler for my Radio-86RK emulator. That debugging meant some dancing around HTML.

To build a final HTML file from a bunch of tiny files I used a very simple program. Here is a bit of code from it:

...
  while (!feof(f)) {
    char line[1024];
    *line = 0;
    fgets(line, sizeof(line), f);
    printf(line);
  }
...

Implied that this code should copy all lines from a file f to the standard output.

Even if we don’t care about using a buffer with a constant length and rest of other C-like features, this code has one serious drawback which embarrassed me for a quite awhile. It worked okay until I had started to play with percent widths and heights of HTML objects.

Instead of getting:

<table width="100%">

I was ending up with:

<table width="100">

You have probably already guessed why. But to tell the truth I had been investigating this up to half an hour.

So instead of:

printf(line);

I had to write:

printf("%s", line);

Otherwise all percentage characters are treated as formatters because the first parameter of printf() is a format and all non-escaped % characters will be deleted. That is what was happening to me.

Conclusion (following after the first one - “serves you right”): It is much safer to write in C++ and use STL streams for formatting.