The Incredible Journey

Always use const char * to refer to the return value from SvPV.

Yesterday I got a bug report from a user via Github about Text::Fuzzy.

The bug report described that in some cases, when the user searched for an edit distance with Unicode strings, the user's input value, $string in the following, seemed to be being overwritten and corrupted:

$tf->distance ($string);

I couldn't reproduce the user's bug using the script he supplied, but just in case, I went through the code and tried to find anywhere that a string might be being overwritten, by adding const in front of every char * pointer which was used to store a Perl string.

This led me to this line where the value corresponding to $string in the above is read using SvPV, and this line where the value pointed to is overwritten by the code. This is a special case which only executes when the user matches a byte string against a character string.

As a fix for the bug, I changed to using allocated memory after the test for Unicode, and added a field allocated to the tf->b and set it to true or false so that the allocated memory could be freed. In a later commit I also added a test that the bug was fixed.

However, it would have been better if I had never allocated the return value from SvPV into a char * but always used a const char *.

According to Ken Thompson,

Const only confuses library interfaces with the hope of catching some rare errors

(source) but I'm not sure I agree with him.