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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | CONFORMING TO | BUGS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHONThe Linux Programming Interface


MEMMEM(3)                     Linux Programmer's Manual                     MEMMEM(3)

NAME         top

       memmem - locate a substring

SYNOPSIS         top

       #define _GNU_SOURCE         /* See feature_test_macros(7) */
       #include <string.h>

       void *memmem(const void *haystack, size_t haystacklen,
                    const void *needle, size_t needlelen);

DESCRIPTION         top

       The memmem() function finds the start of the first occurrence of the substring
       needle of length needlelen in the memory area haystack of length haystacklen.

RETURN VALUE         top

       The memmem() function returns a pointer to the beginning of the substring, or
       NULL if the substring is not found.

CONFORMING TO         top

       This function is a GNU extension.

BUGS         top

       This function was broken in Linux libraries up to and including libc 5.0.9;
       there the needle and haystack arguments were interchanged, and a pointer to
       the end of the first occurrence of needle was returned.

       Both old and new libc's have the bug that if needle is empty, haystack-1
       (instead of haystack) is returned.  And glibc 2.0 makes it worse, returning a
       pointer to the last byte of haystack.  This is fixed in glibc 2.1.

SEE ALSO         top

       strstr(3)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project.  A
       description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found
       at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

GNU                                   2008-12-05                            MEMMEM(3)

HTML rendering created 2010-12-03 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface

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