I have seen one too many instances of checking strtol () results wrong, so, for the record:

Update: Sigh, two too many, a portable check for empty input added.

To convert const char *str to a long, properly checking for overflow, invalid trailing characters and empty input, it is necessary to do the following:

char *p;
errno = 0;
result = strtol(str, &p, base);
if (errno != 0 || *p != 0 || p == str)
  error_handling ();

It is necessary to check both errno and *p; if you don't check errno, you get 0 for empty input and LONG_MAX or LONG_MIN for overflow or underflow. On empty input the return value is 0 and errno might be set to EINVAL; the portable way of checking for empty input is comparing p and str.

This will still accept strings that start with white space; check for !isspace((unsigned char)*str) if you want to reject them.

I hope that helps someone.

I was cleaning up cereal a bit and I contemplated replacing db2* (using openjade and DSSSL) with xmlto (using passivetex and XSLT). HTML generation went down from 6 s to 4 s, PDF generation up from 30 s to about 5 min.

Needless to say I'm staying with the DSSSL styles. At least I got a chance to fix some errors caught by the stricter XML parser used by xmlto.

Well, we (Charles University Prague) didn't win the ACM ICPC this year. I had fun anyway.

Installed current CVS GNOME and checked the translations (which turned out to be mostly fine). New GNOME looks really good. I can't wait for FC 2 with Bluecurvized GNOME 2.6; my eyes are too accustomed to the theme, which makes the work with Simple a bit uncomfortable.

A new release of cereal after six months, again with virtually no code changes.

Hopefully it will make the one or two people trying to build cereal on Gentoo happy.