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+@page strings String processing in Tor
+
+Since you're reading about a C program, you probably expected this
+section: it's full of functions for manipulating the (notoriously
+dubious) C string abstraction.  I'll describe some often-missed
+highlights here.
+
+### Comparing strings and memory chunks ###
+
+We provide strcmpstart() and strcmpend() to perform a strcmp with the start
+or end of a string.
+
+	tor_assert(!strcmpstart("Hello world","Hello"));
+	tor_assert(!strcmpend("Hello world","world"));
+
+	tor_assert(!strcasecmpstart("HELLO WORLD","Hello"));
+	tor_assert(!strcasecmpend("HELLO WORLD","world"));
+
+To compare two string pointers, either of which might be NULL, use
+strcmp_opt().
+
+To search for a string or a chunk of memory within a non-null
+terminated memory block, use tor_memstr or tor_memmem respectively.
+
+We avoid using memcmp() directly, since it tends to be used in cases
+when having a constant-time operation would be better.  Instead, we
+recommend tor_memeq() and tor_memneq() for when you need a
+constant-time operation.  In cases when you need a fast comparison,
+and timing leaks are not a danger, you can use fast_memeq() and
+fast_memneq().
+
+It's a common pattern to take a string representing one or more lines
+of text, and search within it for some other string, at the start of a
+line.  You could search for "\\ntarget", but that would miss the first
+line.  Instead, use find_str_at_start_of_line.
+
+### Parsing text ###
+
+Over the years, we have accumulated lots of ways to parse text --
+probably too many. Refactoring them to be safer and saner could be a
+good project!  The one that seems most error-resistant is tokenizing
+text with smartlist_split_strings().  This function takes a smartlist,
+a string, and a separator, and splits the string along occurrences of
+the separator, adding new strings for the sub-elements to the given
+smartlist.
+
+To handle time, you can use one of the functions mentioned above in
+"Parsing and encoding time values".
+
+For numbers in general, use the tor_parse_{long,ulong,double,uint64}
+family of functions.  Each of these can be called in a few ways.  The
+most general is as follows:
+
+      const int BASE = 10;
+      const int MINVAL = 10, MAXVAL = 10000;
+      const char *next;
+      int ok;
+      long lng = tor_parse_long("100", BASE, MINVAL, MAXVAL, &ok, &next);
+
+The return value should be ignored if "ok" is set to false.  The input
+string needs to contain an entire number, or it's considered
+invalid... unless the "next" pointer is available, in which case extra
+characters at the end are allowed, and "next" is set to point to the
+first such character.
+
+### Generating blocks of text ###
+
+For not-too-large blocks of text, we provide tor_asprintf(), which
+behaves like other members of the sprintf() family, except that it
+always allocates enough memory on the heap for its output.
+
+For larger blocks: Rather than using strlcat and strlcpy to build
+text, or keeping pointers to the interior of a memory block, we
+recommend that you use the smartlist_* functions to build a smartlist
+full of substrings in order.  Then you can concatenate them into a
+single string with smartlist_join_strings(), which also takes optional
+separator and terminator arguments.
+
+Alternatively, you might find it more convenient (and more
+allocation-efficient) to use the buffer API in buffers.c: Construct a buf_t
+object, add your data to it with buf_add_string(), buf_add_printf(), and so
+on, then call buf_extract() to get the resulting output.
+
+As a convenience, we provide smartlist_add_asprintf(), which combines
+the two methods above together.  Many of the cryptographic digest
+functions also accept a not-yet-concatenated smartlist of strings.
+
+### Logging helpers ###
+
+Often we'd like to log a value that comes from an untrusted source.
+To do this, use escaped() to escape the nonprintable characters and
+other confusing elements in a string, and surround it by quotes.  (Use
+esc_for_log() if you need to allocate a new string.)
+
+It's also handy to put memory chunks into hexadecimal before logging;
+you can use hex_str(memory, length) for that.
+
+The escaped() and hex_str() functions both provide outputs that are
+only valid till they are next invoked; they are not threadsafe.
+
+*/