non null terminated string help

[kmfna]

Hello all,

My company has recently started working with a 3rd party that has provided us with a .dll which returns a non null-terminated string. I'm not sure exactly what their rationale is behind that, as opposed to a byte array (since we are retrieving an image), but we are looking for a good way to loop through the string and extract the bytes. The further complication is that when the string object comes into c#, it is being interpreted as a 3 character string! The only other piece of information they give is what the size is supposed to be...so, if it weren't being crazily interpreted by c# we could loop through the string and create a byte array, which we could actually use.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks in advance!!
-Kevin

- "The truth hurts, maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with no seat, but it hurts.

 

[litton1]

hmm.. could it be the string is in the form of delimiter hex hex, does it look something like 0255255 ?

Age is a consequence of experience

 

[litton1]

BTW What does the dll do? Also you did say three chars so the hex may just look lke 255 or 192 or 000

Age is a consequence of experience

 

[misterstick]

strings in c# don't have terminators on them.

"non null-terminated string?" what does that mean? has a terminator but not a null, or is just n bytes? either way, how does it expect c# to know when the string is done?

could you post the code you use to access the method in the DLL?

what is the string you're expecting, and what does c# see?



mr s. <

 

[litton1]

When an image is given as a string it could mean that it is in hex data, if it has a delimiter or none null terminator this could mean it has been zipped using a RLE (Run Length Encoded) type algorithm? Just a thought as I have worked with some such images in the past.

Age is a consequence of experience

 

[kmfna]

Hello all,

thank you for your responses, I will work on getting the code snippet from my colleague who is directly dealing with this issue. My understanding is that the .dll is actually a C language file, which doesn't actually have the string class, but they apparently created some kind of wrapper (non .net) that returns a string to us. This is used when scanning check images. Ideally, they should have returned an array or a variant type. My first idea was to create our own c++ wrapper and include it as a .dll in our application, since we could actually create pointers and loop through the data, with the hopes that it actually comes in to us correctly. If it helps, I believe the company calls the .dll A2IA (I have no idea what it stands for) just in case someone has seen this issue before.

Again, I will try to get our sample code and post it.

Thanks again for everyone's help.
-Kevin

- "The truth hurts, maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with no seat, but it hurts.