When I run some code on my machine then it behaves as I expect it to.
When I run it on a colleagues it misbehaves. This is what happens.
I have a string with a value of:
croc_data_0001.idx
when I do a strncpy on the string providing 18 as the length my copied string has a value of:
croc_data_0001.idx♂
If I do the following
myCopiedString[18]='\0';
puts (myCopiedString);
Then the value of the copied string is:
croc_data_0001.idx
What could be causing this problem and why does it get resolved by setting the last char to \0?
According to http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstring/strncpy/
char * strncpy ( char * destination, const char * source, size_t num );
Copy characters from string
Copies the first num characters of source to destination. If the end of the source C string (which is signaled by a null-character) is found before num characters have been copied, destination is padded with zeros until a total of num characters have been written to it. No null-character is implicitly appended to the end of destination, so destination will only be null-terminated if the length of the C string in source is less than num.
Thus, you need to manually terminate your destination with '\0'.