strlcpychar

strlcpychar is a name used in some programming contexts to describe a safe string copy operation for C-style strings. It is not a standardized function, but appears in code samples and library wrappers as an alternative to strcpy that minimizes the risk of buffer overflows by respecting a destination buffer size. The concept emphasizes handling plain char arrays rather than wide or multibyte strings.

Typically implemented with a signature such as size_t strlcpychar(char *dst, const char *src, size_t dstsize). The function copies at most dstsize-1 characters from src to dst, and inserts a null terminator if dstsize is nonzero. If the source string is longer, the copy is truncated, but the resulting string is always null-terminated.

Return value is the length of the source string src. This mirrors the behavior of BSD's strlcpy, enabling callers to detect truncation by comparing the return value with dstsize. strlcpychar differs from strncpy in that it does not pad the destination with characters when src is shorter.

Portability and implementation vary by project. The function is not part of the C standard library, and system implementations of strlcpy may be absent on some platforms. In portable code, developers may provide a custom strlcpychar function or use safe wrappers provided by a library.

Usage notes: ensure the destination buffer is at least one byte larger than the maximum expected length of the copied string, and be mindful of multithreading and source string length evaluation.