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V514. Potential logical error. Size of …
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V514. Potential logical error. Size of a pointer is divided by another value.

Nov 19 2010

The analyzer found a potential error related to division of the pointer's size by some value. Division of the pointer's size is rather a strange operation since it has no practical sense and most likely indicates an error or misprint in code.

Consider an example:

const size_t StrLen = 16;
LPTSTR dest = new TCHAR[StrLen];
TCHAR src[StrLen] = _T("string for V514");
_tcsncpy(dest, src, sizeof(dest)/sizeof(dest[0]));

In the "sizeof(dest)/sizeof(dest[0])" expression, the pointer's size is divided by the size of the element the pointer refers to. As a result, we might get different numbers of copied bytes depending on sizes of the pointer and TCHAR type - but never the number the programmer expected.

Taking into account that the _tcsncpy function is unsafe in itself, correct and safer code may look in the following way:

const size_t StrLen = 16;
LPTSTR dest = new TCHAR[StrLen];
TCHAR src[StrLen] = _T("string for V514");
_tcsncpy_s(dest, StrLen, src, StrLen);

This diagnostic is classified as:

You can look at examples of errors detected by the V514 diagnostic.