Parsing integers in C
In the standard libc API set there are multiple functions provided that do ASCII numbers to integer conversions. They are handy and easy to use, but also error-prone and quite lenient in what they accept and silently just swallow. atoi atoi() is perhaps the most common and basic one. It converts from a string to signed integer. There is also the companion atol() which instead converts to a long. Some problems these have include that they return 0 instead of an error, that they have no checks for under or overflow and in the atol() case there’s this challenge that long has different sizes on different platforms. So neither of them can reliably be used for 64-bit numbers. They also don’t say where the number ended. Using these functions opens up your parser to not detect and…
