How to print a null-terminated string with newlines without showing backslash escapes in gdb?

Question

I have a variable

char* x = "asd\nqwe\n ... "

and I want to print it with newlines printed as newlines not backslash n. Is it possible?

Adjudge

if nought else works, you can replace the '\n' with '\x0a' - this will the linefeed char directly. – Castoff

@slashmais: This will still show up as \n in gdb output – Exacting

Actually, I came here for a way to PRINT the \n >.> .. I was able to do this: print (char*)[nsstring cString] – Downey

For those who don't care about the \n, use: x/s x – Plotter

Answer 1

Update: Why not just use the gdb printf command?

(gdb) printf "%s", x
asd
qwe
...
(gdb)

---

Old answer: From within the debugger you can execute commands. Just call printf

(gdb) call printf("%s", x)
asd
qwe
...
(gdb)

Exacting

I can't use stdout or stderr because these channels are attached to other program. – Guidry

Note that it's important to terminate the printf command with a /n if your char* doesn't already end with one. – Beatrix

Worth to note that printf() function call may succeed and return the number of characters in the string, but not actually output those characters on the screen; the same holds true for puts() function call and perhaps others of that kind. In contrast, the built-in printf command works as expected. – Whittington

Answer 2

Use the string specifier:

print /s x

Battery

This is definitely better than calling the debugged program's functions like printf, but may only work on relatively new versions of GDB: mine yields “Format letter "s" is meaningless in "print" command”, for example. – Whittington

This don't work when x is a variable other than address, in that case, need use x command, e.g x/s x, or need a type convert, e.g p (char *) &x. – Preacher

This will not work when the string is larger than some length. It gets truncated when printing. printf method does print the full string. – Lighterman

when your string is in a buffer then "p/s (char *)buff" – Shote

In response to @Lighterman see https://mcmap.net/q/80260/-how-do-i-print-the-full-value-of-a-long-string-in-gdb and try set print elements 0 – Cushitic