For initial string input, i.e. from a network/file/terminal stream, using fgetc and/or fgets plus code to verify and sanitize makes the most sense IMO. This do

For initial string input, i.e. from a network/file/terminal stream, using fgetc and/or fgets plus code to verify and sanitize makes the most sense IMO. This does mean you have to write a lot of C code for what would be simple tasks in other languages, e.g. a correct file open, read-to-dynamically-allocated-memory, and file close with good error checking is a full page (at least) of dense code in C and just two lines in Python. If you've done a good job sanitizing and verifying all the input to your program, only then does it becomes relatively safe to use the standard string functions, with caveats for multithreading. Asking ChatGPT to compare and contrast fgetc and fgets is a good place to start, and then ask how to use fgets to handle errors during stream I/O, and what can go wrong with multithreading etc. Then take a look at the sqlite source code for in-house C-string handling, here's the take-away comment: "Because there is no consistency, we will define our own." https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src/util.c https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src/util.c